Macau, China, 26 Jan – Visitors from Asia accounted for 97.5 percent of Macau ’s record 28 million arrivals last year, according to official tourism statistics cited by The Macau Post Daily earlier this week.
In 2010, Asians made up 97.2 percent of all visitor arrivals.
While the total number of visitor arrivals rose 12.2 percent last year, the number of arrivals from Asia was up 12.4 percent year-on-year.
A total of 16.1 million mainlanders from China visited Macau last year, a year-on-year growth of 22.2 percent. Chinese mainlanders accounted for 57.7 percent of all arrivals.
The number of Hong Kong citizens visiting Macau increased just 1.6 percent to 7.5 million last year, accounting for 27 percent of the total number. The number of Taiwanese visitors dropped six percent to 1.2 million.
Visitors from the greater China area (mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan ) accounted for 89.1 percent of Macau ’s total visitor arrivals in 2011. In the previous year, the area accounted for 88 percent of the total number.
The number of Japanese visitor arrivals dropped 4.2 percent to 396,023.
South Korean tourists slightly exceeded the number of Japanese visitor arrivals last year: 398,807, up 20.2 percent.
The number of Malaysian visitor arrivals fell four percent to 324,509.
Analysts pointed out that the number of visitor arrivals from India grow a disappointingly modest 0.3 percent to a mere 169,660 last year, in spite of high-profile efforts by the Macau Government Tourist Office (MGTO) to attract more Indian tourists.
The number of visitor arrivals from Europe rose three percent to 251,748, while 127,983 visitors from Australia , New Zealand and elsewhere in Oceania visited Macau last year, up 0.3 percent. A total of 310,608 visitors from the Americas arrived in Macau in 2011, a year-on-year growth of 4.5 percent.
Same-day visitors accounted for 53.8 percent of Macau ’s total number of arrivals last year.
Last year, 54.6 percent of all visitors arrived by land via Zhuhai, 39.4 percent arrived by sea from Hong Kong and Guangdong , and just six percent arrived by air.(MacauNews/Tourism)
