DELIGHTFUL DILEMMA

2014/10/24

From：Macau Business Daily

Macau may welcome 32 million visitors this year. Considerably overshooting MGTO estimates. Some 23.5 million visitors arrived in the first 9 months.

Macau could receive some 32 million tourists this year, two million more than predicted by authorities as the number of mainland Chinese visitors continues to increase by two digits and exponentially faster than other nationalities. The tourism industry here is also becoming increasingly dependent upon the Chinese inflow, which now accounts for almost 70 percent of all visitors, signalling the need to diversify.
Every month, Macau beats its latest all-time record in terms of tourist arrivals, with September no exception. According to the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC), some 2.5 million people visited Macau last month, with half of them (1.24 million) same-day visitors. On average, tourists stayed one day in Macau.
In addition to a record September, the year-to-date figure is going through the roof. Between January and September this year, Macau processed 23.5 million visitor arrivals. That’s 7.4 percent more compared to the same period in 2013 (21.9 million people) and an extra 1.6 million visitors from a year ago.
The Director of the Macau Government Tourist Office (MGTO), Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, said recently that she’s expecting 30 million tourists this year. With just over two months to go, the 30 million tourist barrier is expected by authorities to be breached.

Million and millions

In the last quarter of 2013, more than 7.4 million people visited Macau, official data reveals. If this figure increases by 7 percent (the growth rate registered in the first three quarters of the year) then some 8 million more visitors could arrive in the territory by the end of the year. If this trend is confirmed, then in total, Macau visitation could reach 31.5 million for 2014. Not only a record but also 1.5 million over government projections. In 2013, the number of tourist arrivals totalled 29.3 million.
Macau’s tourism industry is booming but it’s also becoming dependent upon a single group: mainlanders. In the first three quarters of the year, tourists from China accounted for 67.2 percent of the total versus 63.7 percent in the same period last year. In one year, the number of mainlanders visiting Macau increased by 2 million.
But if the interest in Macau is growing among the Chinese, it is decreasing in its other two big markets: Hong Kong and Taiwan. Tourists from Hong Kong declined 5.2 percent in the first nine months of 2014 compared to a year ago. Those from Taiwan dropped by 1.7 percent. Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan account for 92 percent of all Macau’s visitations. Other smaller but important generators of tourists to Macau are also in the red. Visitors from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand decreased by 7.3 percent, 9.3 percent, 5.2 percent and 25.9 percent, respectively, in the first nine months.

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