Commentary by Prisca Tang
After the latest COVID-19 cases involving family, security staff and renovation worker clusters, the city’s tourism industry revenue plummeted. While many people are depending on our government to launch support policies and even subsidies to ensure that the tourism and gaming industries can recover, I think we should all be in this together.
When a friend of mine from the mainland came to Macau to visit me on New Year’s Eve, we went shopping in one of the Cotai malls. As we were searching for a gift at a high-end shop, I overheard our assigned sales assistant, who was playing on his phone the entire time, ask his co-worker why he “could not reach a higher level” on, I assumed, a game. After the shop failed to arrange another sales assistant for us because they were “too busy”, and never followed up on my friend’s complaint for a month, the manager of the shop eventually apologised to me after I wrote an angry email to the luxury brand’s Asia headquarters. The manager explained that the reason why the sales assistant “wasn’t being attentive” was because he (the manager) did not arrange the sales assistant’s work schedule “well enough”, so the latter “did not have lunch”. In my head, I can hear the famous Andy Lau Tak-wah’s advertisement slogan – “in current society, such quality of service is not enough”.
In the first week of December last year, Macau Government Tourism Office (MGTO) Director Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes told reporters that the daily number of visitors varied between 18,000 and 22,000 with a daily average of around 20,000 in December, which was the highest number in 2020 since the COVID-19 pandemic started early that year. While in November, the Grand Lisboa Hotel Manager Henry Kong Fuk Leung told the media that he had been eyeing a 50 percent occupancy rate at his hotel in December, which was also considered a decent number amidst the novel coronavirus pandemic. Even the Statistics and Census Bureau (DSEC) said at that time that in 2020 the third-quarter value of retail sales exceeded casinos’ gross gaming revenue (GGR) which amounted to 4.88 billion patacas in the same quarter, by 27.7 percent. The government and media reminded the public that December would be a busy month for Macau’s tourism industry, especially for retail, yet even a shop manager of a luxury brand at a high-profile mall failed to arrange enough workers on key dates such as New Year’s Eve.
While I felt embarrassed by the treatment my friend received at that shop, she told me it did not surprise her as many users on “Red” –a Chinese social media app –often said that the mall we went to was “known for its bad service”. Why would our tourism-orientated city’s biggest shopping mall have a reputation for having poor service?
Apart from my personal experience at the retail shop, the Macau Gaming Research Association’s Macau Gaming Service Index (GSI) for casino dealers showed that their “tolerance” towards customers decreased 30 percent. The research also pointed out that service providers’ tolerance levels showed “an overall decrease” on the GSI score in 2020. Why would the tolerance level go down when we have fewer visitors? The research was taken in the fourth quarter last year, not long after the issuing of Individual Visit Scheme (IVS) travel permits for mainlanders resumed on September 23. I do not dismiss the idea that, maybe, there are some psychological impacts caused by the COVID-19 pandemic that altered our patience level collectively, but this is a topic for another time.
According to the 2021 Annual Research conducted by the World Travel and Tourism Council, in 2019 the total contribution of travel and tourism to the city’s gross domestic product (GDP) was 83.9 percent. The research also noted that in 2019, 73 percent of inbound arrivals were from the mainland, and in 2020 the figure surged to 83 percent. It goes without saying that, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, our economy heavily relies on mainlanders.
Besides being a Creative City of Gastronomy, Macau is also supposed to be a world-class tourist destination. My friend told me that mainlanders like to shop in Macau because they can have a 20 percent discount on their purchases due to the currency difference between the yuan and pataca. Another reason was because after they win some money playing the tables, they want to celebrate with their families by buying luxury goods. In other words, our retail sector plays a supporting role to our gaming industry, so we must not underestimate all the interaction between the two sectors.
‘Taxi Chaos’
Meanwhile, when I was doing my research for this commentary, I randomly stumbled upon a Wikipedia page called “Taxi Chaos in Macau” (澳門的士亂象). It talks about Macau taxi drivers that committed serious violations and lacked professional ethics. The page also said that in 2013 the problem arose due to the insufficient number of taxi drivers and overwhelmingly high number of visitors. It also pointed out that in 2018, the government set up stricter rules for taxi drivers and how in the same year the local taxi unions insisted that only a small number of cabbies acted “ruthlessly”.
I am ashamed to admit that I am an avid taxi-rider. I can take up to three taxi rides per day and more than 20 times a week. Talking to the taxi drivers is one of my favourite things to do, and I can say with confidence that the majority of the taxi drivers that I have spoken to have great attitudes. Of course, I have met bad ones too.
I heard horror stories from my father about how he had got into a cab in front of Grand Lisboa Hotel in 2019 and been asked to pay 200 patacas for his trip to the Outer Harbour Terminal. While I thought people would have changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, some taxi drivers continued to be their sector’s rotten apples.
I have experienced taxi drivers who were unhappy with the short duration of my trip so they decided to curse and speed the entire way. I also once had a driver who refused to pick me up at the pre-arranged location despite the fact that I had gastroenteritis. I have also heard multiple stories about taxis refusing to drop passonges off at the said location because it was “inconvenient for the driver”. These were nothing compared to the “chaos” I heard about pre-COVID-19 days but this also shows that we still have small kinks to work on. We wouldn’t want one or two bad apples spoiling the entire image of Macau.
As a reporter, I have been writing article after article about MGTO’s Macau Week events held in different cities in the mainland to promote Macau as a “healthy, quality and safe travel destination”. To me, it seems that the government has been fighting long and hard enough for economic recovery but are we just bystanders?
While I think that the government should create catchy slogans to remind the service sector about proper attitudes, I also think it is important for the service providers to be up to date about the number of visitor arrivals the city would be expecting and make arrangements accordingly. Christmas is approaching again, the city has been quiet for the recent two biggest holiday seasons, so we should all be ready for the upcoming events.
I don’t think the tourism sector’s recovery should be a “one-man job”, you and I should also be “Macau’s tourism ambassadors” by performing little acts of kindness, such as holding the door for the person following you, saying thank you, pointing out directions, and smiling (as Thai people famously do all the time when coming across a tourist). Rome was not built in a day but step by step we can all play our little but vital roles to help our city enjoy a faster economic recovery that might even improve its service quality.
A man wheeling a suitcase crosses a once-so-busy pelican crossing in Avenida do Infante D. Henrique yesterday. Photo: Prisca Tang
Scores of visitors entering Macau via the Barrier Gate checkpoint on Tuesday after Zhuhai lifted its 14-day mandatory quarantine for arrivals from Macau. Photo: MPDG
