Macau’s visitor arrivals surged by 43.6 percent year-on-year to 16.7 million in the first half of 2024, recovering to 82.4 percent of pre-pandemic levels.
This growth was driven by a 59.3 percent increase in same-day visitors and a 29.1 percent rise in overnight visitors.

The mainland China market, Macau’s largest source, saw a 52.9 percent jump in visitor numbers to 11.5 million, including a 31.8 percent increase in Individual Visit Scheme (IVS) visitors to nearly 6 million. Visitation from the nine cities in the Greater Bay Area (GBA) also rose by 48.2 percent to 5.6 million.
The data from Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) show that the newly added ten cities to the IVS scheme proved to be a significant catalyst, with visitor arrivals from these cities soaring by 89 percent year-on-year to 251,678, including 21,668 IVS visitors.
The ten new IVS cities were Foshan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen, Zhaoqing, Huizhou, Shanwei, Heyuan, Yangjiang, Qingyuan, and Chaozhou, further expanding Macau’s mainland Chinese visitor base.
International visitors jumped by 146.3 percent year-on-year, to nearly 1.2 million in the first half of 2024, back to 67.2 percent of the figure in the same period of 2019.