Macau’s hotel guests dropped by 73.5 percent year-on-year to 1.83 million in the first half of this year, the Statistics and Census Bureau (DSEC) said in a statement yesterday.
While the DSEC statement did not explain the steep decline, trade sources attributed it to the local impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the first six months of the year, the average occupancy rate of guestrooms stood at 27.2 percent, a drop of 63.9 percentage points year-on-year.
At the end of June, 109 hotels and guesthouses open for business comprised 35,000 guestrooms, down by 10.6 percent year-on-year.
The bureau pointed out that its first-half data on hotels and guesthouses excluded those booked by the government for COVID-19 quarantine purposes.
In June, guestrooms’ average occupancy rate fell by 77.6 percentage points to 11.8 percent. The average occupancy rate of 5-star hotels (5.8 percent) declined by 74.7 percentage points, while the average occupancy rates of 2-star hotels (28.9 percent) and guesthouse (35.0 percent) dropped by 42.9 percentage points and 28.2 percentage points respectively.
In June, the number of hotel and guesthouse guests fell by 88.0 percent to 134,000. Guests from the mainland (67,000) and Hong Kong (11,000) plummeted by more than 90 percent each.
However, the number of local guests (53,000) grew by 4.2 percent due to promotion packages offered to residents by some hotels.
The statement pointed out that due to Macau’s ongoing quarantine measures for arrivals, there were no package tour visitors in June, while the number of outbound travellers using the services of travel agencies amounted to a mere 200.
