Tourism | Package tour visitors slightly up

Visitors travelling on package tours to Macau totaled about 575,000 in April, according to new information from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC), down by 31.7 percent year-on-year, but up 2.2 percent compared to the month of March.
Across the first four months of 2016, visitors on package tours amounted to 2,275,000, down by 34 percent in comparison to the same period in 2015.
In April, package tour visitors from mainland China (451,000) decreased by 34.1 percent year-on-year, while those from South Korea (29,000) and Taiwan (29,000) dropped by 13.2 percent and 39.8 percent respectively. Contrarily, package tour visitors from Thailand (16,000) registered an increase of 34.3 percent.
Meanwhile, residents utilizing the services of travel agencies for their outbound trips totaled 89,000 in April, down by 21.6 percent year-on-year and 16.9 percent month-to-month, which DSEC attributes to the fact that the Easter holidays fell in April 2015, but March in 2016.
There were 106 hotels and guesthouses operating in Macau at the end of April, an increase of seven year-on-year. The number of guest rooms amounted to 32,000, up by 3,800 (+13.6 percent) year-on-year, with rooms in 5-star hotels (20,000) and 4-star hotels (7,700) accounting for 63.6 percent and 24 percent respectively.
A total of 917,000 guests checked into hotels and guesthouses in April, up by 11.5 percent year-on-year, led by a 16.7 percent increase in guests from mainland China (610,000). The number of guests in the first four months of 2016 rose by 12.9 percent to 3,578,000 when compared with the same period in the previous year.