SPENDING ON SPENDING

2014/8/12

From:Macau Business Daily

More visitors mean more spending. Not just by tourists. The government is allocating 57 million patacas to research what visitors are splashing out on. And what they think about local hospitality services.

The government is to spend over 57 million patacas (US$7.2 million) to survey visitor spending here by outsourcing the statistical task to local company Macao Research Centre. This is the third time the company has won a public tender for the official visitors’ spending study.
For three years from June 1, 2014 to May 31, 2017, the government is to pay nearly 57.53 million patacas to Macao Research Centre to survey inbound visitors’ spending patterns in the city plus their opinions on local hospitality service, the Official Gazette announced yesterday.
The findings of the survey, for which the research company is committed to a four-year service contract with the government, is published on the Statistics and Census Service website on a quarterly basis.
MRS received over 28 million patacas for running the survey from 2009 to 2011, and over 58 million patacas for taking over the survey again between 2011 and 2014.
By comparison, when the government here first established the Cultural Industry Fund in 2013, it injected 200 million patacas. This money went towards an entire industry, and the government said it was ‘to foster local cultural and creative industries and talent in the form of subsidies and awards.’
Statistics and Census Service told Business Daily that there had been only one company placing a bid earlier this year to take up the visitors’ spending survey this time, which is the long-time outsource partner Macao Research Centre.
As required by the government, the research company must collect visitors’ data at all immigration points in the city.
Macau received a total of 15.28 million inbound visitors in the first six months of this year, about 8 percent more than a year ago, data from the Statistics and Census Service shows. For 2013, the city saw a record 29 million-plus visitors coming here.
The visitors’ spending survey released by the census, of which the latest data refers only to the first quarter, shows that the average daily spending per visitor amounts to 2,074 patacas, which has risen by one percent year-on-year; the average daily spending of a mainland Chinese visitor, the dominant source of tourists and the highest spending group, has meanwhile dropped by an annual 4 percent to 2,534 patacas.

Copyright@Macau Business Daily