5-year record for July visitors

2014/8/25

From：Macau Business Daily

Last month, more than 2.75 million visited Macau for a day or overnight. The highest number recorded for July since 2009. Mainland tourists continue to grow at double the average, official statistics reveal.

The number of visitors to Macau reached a five-month record in July, with the flood of mainland tourists continuing to grow above average, and now joined by Koreans and Australians.
According to the Statistics and Census Services, visitor arrivals totalled 2.75 million in July, a 7 percent increase or 200,000 more tourists compared to the same month last year. A little more than half (53 percent) were day-trippers.
July’s performance was the best since March. More people arrived in Macau last month than in each of the previous five. Since March, the monthly average of arrivals has hit the 2.6 million mark, official data reveals.
But that’s not all. The 2.75 million arrivals last month also represented the highest value for July since 2009. That year, 1.7 million people visited Macau in July. And it has been growing ever since: In 2010, there were 2.1 million July arrivals and in 2013 around 2.5 million.
Day-tripper arrivals also mirrored the trend, posting the best performance since 2011. Last July, there were 1,29 million same-day visitors to Macau, a 12.3 increase from a year ago (1.2 million) and only behind 2012’s record 1.3 million tourists that arrived and left on the same day.
The growing number of tourists this year has been boosted by Mainland China, Macau’s biggest source of tourists and the recovery seen in other markets like South Korea and Australia. They have been compensating the drop of Hong Kong tourists here, Macau’s second biggest source of visitors.

Mainlanders dominate

In July, mainland arrivals topped 1.87 million. This was a growth of 12.7 percent from a year ago and almost two times the average rate increase of arrivals in Macau. Visitors from mainland China accounted for 68 percent of the total, followed by Hong Kong with a 20 percent share and Taiwan with 3 percent, the Statistics and Census said on Friday. In July, however, the best performing markets were South Korea and Australia. Tourists coming from the first increased 24.4 percent last month year-on-year, while Aussie visitors totalled 9,300 in July, 17 percent more than in 2013.
From January to July, Macau received 18 million visitors, 8 percent more than the same period in 2013. Around a third of them came from Guangdong Province.
The average length of stay of visitors in Macau was one day. Overnight tourists spent 1.9 days here, while day-trippers stayed 0.2 days. The government and the casino industry here are making efforts to diversify the tourist offering in Macau in order to attract more overnight tourists and prolong their stay.

Copyright@Macau Business Daily