Visitor arrivals in the Macau SAR have decreased by 28.6 percent month-on-month from 3.22 million to 2.3 million in September 2023.
August visitor arrivals were the highest monthly figure so far this year. Even with the decline in September, Macau visitor arrivals still increased 3.1 times compared to the same period last year.
In September, the gaming hub received 534,755 visitors from Hong Kong. This represents approximately 23 percent of the tally.
Visitors from the nine Pearl River Delta cities in the Greater Bay Area soared by 153.6 percent year-on-year to 749,926, of whom 28.7 percent came from Zhuhai (214,970) and 21.7 percent from Guangzhou (162,966).
According to data recently published by the Macau government, as regards the source of visitors, the number of visitors from mainland China increased by 216.2 percent year-on-year to 1,589,423, with those traveling under the Individual Visit Scheme (746,605) surging by 296.8 percent.
The number of overnight visitors in September also increased 317 percent from the same month of 2022 to approximately 1.17 million people, with same-day visitors increasing by 307 percent yearly to 1.13 million.
Meanwhile, the average length of stay of visitors dropped by 0.4 day year-on-year to 1.4 days, and the duration for overnight visitors (2.5 days) decreased by one day, whereas that for same-day visitors remained unchanged.
In the first three quarters of 2023, the number of visitor arrivals expanded by 356.6 percent year-on-year to 19,928,168. And the tourism authorities are expecting to receive 24 million visitors by year-end.
Before the COVID outbreak, Macau received 39.4 million visitor arrivals in 2019, and the tourism market was overwhelmingly a Chinese tourism market, with mainland China and Hong Kong accounting for 89.6 percent. Nowadays, the authorities are seeking to diversify its source market, as the whole industry has been tasked to lure more overseas visitors.
