Macau’s 115 hotels and guesthouses welcomed 157,000 guests last month, a year-on-year decline of 85.4 per cent, the Statistics and Census Bureau (DSEC) announced today.
The number of guests from the Chinese mainland (106,000) and Hong Kong (21,000) fell 86.3 per cent and 81.0 per cent, respectively.
The number of available guestrooms dropped 3.8 per cent year-on-year to 37,000.
Guests’ average length of stay rose by 0.3 night year-on-year to 1.8 nights.
The bureau pointed out that due to the “substantial decline” in the number of visitor arrivals amidst the ongoing novel coronavirus epidemic, guestrooms’ average occupancy rate dropped 76.9 percentage points year-on-year to 15.0 per cent in February. Five-star hotels’ average occupancy rate declined 84.0 percentage points to just 10.0 per cent, while the decrease in the average guestroom occupancy rates of 2-star hotels (36.9 per cent) and guesthouse (43.3 per cent) was relatively small, with respective declines of 33.8 percentage points and 22.4 percentage points, as some of their guestrooms were provided by employers to their non-resident workers for temporary accommodation during the city’s current entry and exit restrictions in response to the COVID-19 crisis.
In the first two months of the year, the average occupancy rate of guestrooms stood at 50.3 per cent, representing a drop of 42.1 percentage points year-on-year. The number of guests of hotels and guesthouses dropped 46.4 per cent to 1.24 million in this period, even as their average length of stay increased by 0.1 night to 1.6 nights.
Macau’s tourism and hospitality sectors have been hit hard by the novel coronavirus epidemic since late January.
Meanwhile, the bureau also said that there were only 200 package tour visitors last month, while the number of local travel agencies’ outbound travellers fell 98.1 per cent to 3,000.
(The Macau Post Daily/Macau News)
