More than 3.73 million passengers passed through Macau International Airport (MIA) between January and June this year – a 91 percent increase on the same period in 2023, the Macau International Airport Company Limited (known by its Portuguese initials CAM) has announced.
People flying to and from mainland China made up 46 percent of the passenger volume, while those on Taiwan routes made up 17 percent. The remaining 37 percent of passengers were flying international routes, something the airport has been pushing to increase.
Between January and May, 230,000 foreign passport holders travelled through MIA – a whopping 280 percent increase on the same period last year, according to CAM. That aligns with recent comments from the Macao Government Tourism Office indicating a sharp rise in international visitors during the first five months of this year, many of them on package tours.
[See more: Foreign visitor arrivals rose sharply in the first six months of 2024]
CAM said that passenger flows should continue to climb during the summer, and estimated that 1.4 million passengers would use the airport between July and August. At the start of this year, CAM’s marketing director, Eric Fong, said he expected passenger volumes to grow by up to 15 percent in 2024. That would mean an overall total of up to 5.92 million passengers, which current figures suggest may have been a conservative estimate.
Aircraft movements in the first half of the year, meanwhile, were up 72 percent. Both passenger volumes and aircraft movements represented recoveries of about 80 percent when compared with the first half of 2019 – before the Covid-pandemic decimated international tourism.
The daily number of inbound and outbound passengers combined averaged 20,000 over the first six months of the year, while the airport saw about 165 daily flight movements on average.
CAM noted that three new airlines were approved to fly new routes from the MIA in July: Korean Air is now flying to Seoul, while Malaysian carriers Firefly Airlines and Batik Air are introducing flights to Tawau, Malaysia.
