About 102,000 foreign passport holders visited Macao on package tours in the first half of 2024 – a major year-on-year surge of 845 percent, according to figures from the Statistics and Census Service (known by its Portuguese initials DSEC).
South Koreans made up the biggest percentage, with 42,000 tour-goers hailing from the East Asian nation (an almost 15-fold increase on the first half of 2023). While the number of Indian passport-holders travelling to Macao on package tours came in at a relatively modest 13,000, that group saw the most growth: more than 20 times as many Indians visited between January and June this year than during last year’s corresponding period.
Macao’s total number of inbound package tourists between January and June tallied to 968,000, with 88 percent of them from the mainland. The overall figure was up 166 percent when compared with the first half of last year.
[See more: Foreign visitor arrivals rose sharply in the first six months of 2024]
Meanwhile, 259,000 Macao residents purchased outbound travel services through agencies in the first half of last year – a 50 percent year-on-year increase.
DSEC also revealed that 143 hotel establishments were operating in the SAR as of the end of June, a year-on-year increase of 12. The total number of guest rooms on offer rose by nine percent, reaching 47,000.
The city’s hotels welcomed a collective 7,277,000 guests across the first half of the year, up 20 percent year-on-year and five percent when compared with the same period in 2019 – prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, DSEC noted.
