The first month of 2024 – exactly four years after the Covid-19 pandemic began – saw 2,861,609 visitors enter Macao.
That figure, recently released by the Statistics and Census Service (known by its Portuguese initials DSEC), represents an 83.5 percent recovery compared with January 2019 – the last full year before Covid-19 decimated the tourism industry.
Compared with December 2023, which included the Christmas and New Year’s Eve rush, January experienced a 2.8 percent decline in visitor numbers. Year on year, the January total is a 104.7 percent rise compared with January 2023, when the SAR was starting to re-open after the pandemic.
[See more: Are there too many tourists coming to Macao?]
While visitors from Hong Kong (546,277) are back to their pre-pandemic level, those from the Chinese mainland (2,056,133) and Taiwan (59,921) were at 82.1 and 69 percent, respectively.
Almost 200,000 international visitors entered Macao in January, a 66.4 percent recovery when compared with the same month in 2019. More than a quarter of them hailed from South Korea, with the Philippines the next biggest source of international arrivals, followed by Thailand. Malaysia, Japan and the US were similarly sized sources of tourists last month – with each supplying between 10,000 and 11,000 visitors.
The average length of stay for January came in at 1.2 days, a slight year-on-year reduction.
Arrivals via Macau International Airport were up 156.3 percent, year-on-year.
