The number of visitors arriving in Macau on package tours increased by 16.3% year-on-year to 799,000 in October, aided by the National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival holidays, according to information from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC).
The figure included an impressive 17.0% jump in mainland Chinese arrivals via package tours to 647,000, while Korean arrivals jumped 29.2% to 40,000 and Taiwanese arrivals 11.8% to 43,000. For the first 10 months of the year, package tour visitation has increased 11.5% to 6.8 million.
There has also been an increase in the number of outbound Macau residents using travel agencies, up 18.7% year-on-year in October to 123,000, with those on package tours up 23.2% to 48,000. The majority of those, 30,000, visited mainland China – representing an increase of 11.5%. For the first 10 months of 2017, outbound residents using services of travel agencies totaled 1.14 million, up 11.7% year-on-year.
There were 108 hotels and guesthouses operating at the end of October 2017, with the number of guest rooms increasing by 2.0% year-on-year to 37,000. The number of 5-star hotel rooms rose by 2.6% to 22,000, accounting for 60.4% of the total.
As a result, the number of guests staying in these properties increased by 0.3% in October, led by a 5.5% surge in mainland Chinese guests to 1.09 million. Those from Korea rose by 86.5% while those from Hong Kong (110,000) and Taiwan (39,000) dropped by 29.4% and 1.3% respectively.
The average length of stay of guests went up by 0.1 nights year-on-year to 1.5 nights. The average occupancy rate of hotels & guesthouses stood at 88.2%, up by 4.1 percentage points year-on-year, with 5-star hotels (89.8%) and 4-star hotels (89.1%) recording relatively high rates in October, up by 4.9 percentage points and 1.2 percentage points respectively year-on-year.
