Golden Week in May is expected to bring 130,000 visitors a day to Macau, according to Helena de Senna Fernandes, director of Tourism Services. If the projection is fulfilled, the city will welcome more than half a million visitors, exceeding last year’s record (approximately 492,000 tourists, with a daily average of around 100,000 visitors in the first three days).
It should be noted that in 2023, the authorities forecast 70,000 daily arrivals.
The forecast for this festive season is close to the 2019 figures, when around 530,000 visitors entered Macau in three days (an average of 177,000 per day).
Andy Wu, president of the Macau Tourism Industry Association, told the newspaper Tribuna de Macau that the average forecast by the Tourism Bureau should be exceeded on Saturday, as Hong Kong will also have a day off.
Hotel occupancy
The association leader told the same newspaper that the booking rate for hotel rooms is expected to reach 90 percent. Luís Herédia, meanwhile, told Tribuna de Macau that now “there is a longer distribution of travel planning, people are starting to enter a more contained phase, perhaps less of a ‘revenge’ phase”, which means that we won’t have a very long period of peak occupancy. Prices themselves won’t be at their highest”. For this reason, the president of the Macau Hotel Association lowers his estimate to 80 percent, “maybe a little more”.
Macau hotels welcomed more than 3.7 million guests in the first quarter of the year, up 39.7 percent year-on-year and 8.4 percent compared to the same quarter in 2019, the Statistics and Census Bureau (DSEC) announced earlier this week. In the quarter under review, the average occupancy rate of hotel guest rooms stood at 84.8%, up 9.9 percentage points year-on-year.
Between January and March, the territory had 141 hotel establishments, 15 more than in the same period last year, offering 47,000 rooms, according to the statement. Of the total of 3,779,000 guests in Macau, 2.8 million came from China, or 40.1% more year-on-year, while those from Hong Kong (460,000), Taiwan (89,000) and South Korea (80,000) rose by 0.8%, 180.7% and 789.0% respectively. The Chinese special administrative region saw more than 8.8 million visitors in the first quarter of the year, 79.4% more than in the same period in 2023.
