Macau recorded 16.72 million visitor arrivals in the first half of this year, a year-on-year growth of 43.6 percent, the Statistics and Census Bureau (DSEC) has announced today.
According to a DSEC statement, the number of visitor arrivals between January and June reached 82.4 percent of the figure in the same period of pre-pandemic 2019.
Same-day visitors (8.88 million) and overnight visitors (7.83 million) showed respective growth of 59.3 percent and 29.1 percent year on year. The ratio of same-day visitors to overnight visitors was 1:0.9.
Visitors' average length of stay dipped by 0.1 day year on year to 1.2 days. Overnight visitors's average stay remained unchanged at 2.3 days.
Mainlanders accounted for 69.0 percent of all visitor arrivals. Some 35.6 percent of all visitor arrivals came for the nine Guangdong cities in the Greater Bay Area (GBA).
Hongkongers accounted for 21.6 percent of all visitor arrivals between January and June.
The number of foreign visitors, i.e., those not from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, leaped by 146.3 percent year on year to 1.16 million, or 6.9 percent of Macau's total number of visitor arrivals in the first six months of the year, reaching 67.2 percent of the figure in the same period in pre-pandemic 2019.
Foreign visitors included 231,859 from South Korea (+400.4 percent), 91,953 from Indonesia (+58.2 percent), and 69.566 from the US (+129.4 percent).
In June, visitor arrivals rose by 15.5 percent to 2.55 million.
Macau's population stood at 686,400 at the end of March, according to the latest available official demographics.
Shopping (jewellery shops, pharmacies, supermarkets), casino gambling, visiting Macau's UNESCO-listed World Heritage sites and eating-out are Macau's main tourist attracts, tour guides say. Macau is a free port and separate customs territory of the People's Republic of China (PRC). There is no value added tax (VAT) in Macau.
Caption: Tourists and locals queue for take-away drinks at a shop in the city centre near S. Domingos Municipal Market this evening. - Photo: Carl Leong
