Macau’s number of visitor arrivals last month rose a mere 1.8 per cent year-on-year to 3.2 million, while the visitor arrivals in the first 10 months of the year still grew 15.3 per cent to 33.4 million, the Statistics and Census Bureau (DSEC) announced on Thursday.
In October last year, visitor arrival surged 23.2 percent year-on-year to 3.15 million. The bureau at that time attributed the two-digit growth to the opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (HZMB) in that month.
Tourism sector representatives told The Macau Post Daily on Thursday that the wave of violence by radical protesters in Hong Kong over the past few months was gradually having an adverse impact on the local tourism industry.
Same-day visitors last month increased 8.1 per cent to 1.73 million, whereas overnight visitors dropped 4.8 per cent to 1.47 million year-on-year.
Visitors’ average length of stay remained unchanged at 1.2 days in October.
Mainlanders accounted for 72.9 per cent of all visitor arrivals last month. Some 52.9 per cent of the 2.34 million mainlanders who visited Macau in October came from Guangdong. Mainland visitor arrivals rose 1.5 percent year-on-year.
Visitors from Hong Kong (567,777) and Taiwan (84,797) rose 11.5 per cent and 3.6 perbcent respectively.
Visitor arrivals from South Korea – Macau’s number-one foreign visitor segment – dived 28.1 per cent to 43,322 in October.
Visitors from the nine mainland cities in the Greater Bay Area (GBA) leapt 28.6 per cent to 1.1 million. A total of 314,708 visitors were from Zhuhai.
In the first 10 months of the year, Macau recorded 167,017 visitors from the US, 61,421 from Canada, 49,861 from the UK and 70,709 from Australia.
