Macau's 123 hotels and guesthouses recorded 1.22 million guests in December, a year-on-year drop of 2.2 percent, the Statistics and Census Bureau (DSEC) announced today.
According to a DSEC statement, the number of guests from the Chinese mainland declined 4.9 percent to 821,000, whereas the number of guests from South Korea (47,000) and Hong Kong (163,000) rose 12.5 percent and 20.4 percent respectively. South Koreans are the hotel sector's number-one foreign guest segment.
In December, the average occupancy rate of guestrooms fell 2.7 percentage points year-on-year to 92 percent. Guests' average length of stay was 1.5 nights, slightly up from a year earlier.
The number of guestrooms decreased 1.4 percent to 38,000 at the end of last year. The bureau attributed the decline to "renovations undertaken in some hotels".
For the whole of 2019, 14.1 million guests checked into the city's hotels and guesthouses, up 1.1 percent year-on-year. Guests from the Chinese mainland (9.8 million), South Korea (553,000) and Hong Kong (1.6 million) grew 1.9 percent, 14.9 percent and 7.4 percent respectively, while those from Taiwan (455,000) fell 3.8 percent.
A hotel executive contacted by The Macau Post Daily today pointed out that the sector only began to be "severely" affected by the novel coronavirus threat in the second half of last month.
