Macau Government Tourist Office (MGTO) Director Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes said on Sunday that official bodies including her office and the Public Security Police (PSP) would review their handling of Saturday’s computer incident in which thousands of people were stuck for hours at the city’s checkpoints.
The tourism chief, who also heads the Tourism Crisis Management Office (GGCT), was asked by reporters about the incident on the sidelines of the opening ceremony of a photo exhibition at the Bank of China Building on Sunday.
According to a PSP statement released on Saturday night after the incident, automated passenger clearance systems – also known as e-channels – at Macau’s border checkpoints did not work properly between 5:18 p.m. and 7:15 p.m. that day due to a computer malfunction.
The police have a “backup plan” to deal with situations like this but it was not launched due to technical issues, the statement added.
Senna Fernandes said that her office had requested local travel agencies and hotels not to take the customers to checkpoints during the computer breakdown, adding that all relevant government bodies had done “as much as they could”. “We’ll discuss how we can improve if similar unfortunate incidents happen again in the future,” Senna Fernandes said.
(Macau News/Macau Post Daily)
