Macau, China, 22 Sept – Over 20 million visitors travelled to Macau in the first eight months of 2008, which represented an increase of 17.1 percent against the same period of 2007, according to official figures released Monday.
The Macau Statistics and Census Bureau said that of the 20.1 million visitors, 11.8 million were from the People’s Republic of China, which was a year on year increase of 25.1 percent.
The number of visitors arriving in Macau by land, mainly from China, was 12.56 million, which represented a rise of 19.3 percent as compared with the same period of 2007.
In the period 6.46 millions visitors, mainly through Hong Kong, arrived in Macau by sea, which was a 12.4 percent rise on the same period of the previous year.
In the first eight months 1.13 million tourists arrived in Macau by air, which was a 20.9 percent increase year on year and passengers from Taiwan accounted for the majority of visitors arriving at Macau’s airport.
In August alone, the number of visitors arriving in Macau totalled 2.58 million, which was a rise of 8.5 percent as compared to the same month of 2007.
The biggest number of tourists was from the People’s Republic of China (1.48 million), which was a rise of 10.6 percent against the year-ago period.
It should be noted that in August there was a 7 percent fall in the number of tourists from Taiwan, which totalled 112,000.
Tourist entries from Hong Kong rose 5.2 percent in August to a total of 757,000.
In 2007 27 million tourists visited Macau.
(MacauNews)
