The government has given 28,213,003 as the final official tally for the number of visitors arriving in Macao in 2023 – slightly lower than the provisional total indicated earlier this month.
The confirmed figure is 71.6 percent of 2019’s pre-pandemic tally, according to a statement from the Information from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC).
Mainland Chinese visitors made up 67.5 percent of 2023’s total. Visitors from the nine mainland cities within Guangdong’s Pearl River Delta region alone made up a third of 2023’s total. Hong Kong visitors accounted for another 25.5 percent.
[See more: Could Macao soon be welcoming more visitors than Hong Kong?]
Just 5.2 percent of visitors to Macao in 2023 hailed from outside Greater China.
The numbers of mainland, Hong Kong and international visitors in 2023 returned to 68.2, 97.8 and 47.6 percent of their corresponding levels in 2019 – the last year before Covid-19 led to closed borders. Across the year, the average length of stay came in at 1.3 days, a year-on-year decrease of 0.2 days.
The DSEC also supplied the official figure for visitor numbers in December: 2,943,930, or a 14 percent month-on-month rise.
