Macau's 120 hotels welcomed 365,000 guests last month, a year-on-year drop of 41.3 percent, the Statistics and Census Bureau (DSEC) said in a statement yesterday.
The bureau did no explain the sharp decline but hotel sector sources contacted by The Macau Post Daily this afternoon attributed it to the resurgence of COVID-19 in neighbouring regions.
While the number of guests from the Chinese mainland fell by 50.2 percent to 269,000, the number of staycationers rose by 23.6 percent to 70,000, according to the statement.
Guests' average length of stay increased by 0.1 night to 1.8 nights.
At the end of March, the number of available guestrooms stood at 39,000, a year-on-year increase of 8.7 percent.
Data on hotels designated for medical observation and self-health monitoring quarantine were excluded from the compilation of the data, the statement pointed out.
Guestrooms' average occupancy rate dropped by 24.8 percentage points to 30.4 percent due to a decrease in the number of overnight visitors, the bureau said.
In the first quarter, the number of guests dropped by 5.6 percent to 1.37 million. Guestrooms' average occupancy rate decreased by 4.2 percentage points to 40.7 percent.
