All rooms open for summer, tourism chief says
The city’s hotel rooms will be fully available for the upcoming summer holidays peak season, Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) director Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes said on the sidelines of the opening of the G2E Asia and the Asian IR Expo.
After the resumption of normal travel, local hotels have been said to be operating at partial capacity due to a persistent lack of workforce. Earlier, Senna Fernandes told the Times that she believed with graduates and for summer job seekers, the situation should ease.
Her comment yesterday acted as a realization of her belief. She added that last week, the city saw an overall hotel occupancy rate of nearly 90%.
On tourist arrival figures, the tourism official disclosed that the first half of the year has counted 11.6 million arriving visitors. The numbers of mainland visitors have recovered to 60% of 2019 numbers and from Hong Kong, even 90%.
However, there is more work to be done to attract foreign visitors, because the quantities of these visitors have only recovered to about 20% of 2019 figures. That is why the MGTO has compiled plans for marketing efforts in foreign source markets in the second half of the year, with Korea the first stop and a campaign to commence next week.
She added that there have been an average of 80,000 arriving visitors per day in the first half of July.
These visitors have not only spent more compared to expenditure seen in 2019, they have also dispersed to community districts. Average tourist spending ranged between MOP2,000 and MOP3,000 in the first quarter of the year, while it was only MOP1,000 in 2019, the official underlined.
A bottleneck factor for tourism recovery is transport capacity, which “is a global challenge,” she said. It takes time to fill positions vacated during the past three years, she added.
Meanwhile, during his keynote speech at the Asian IR Expo, Dr Wilfred Wong, president and executive director of Sands China Ltd., told the audience that he anticipates this year’s gross gambling revenue (GGR) will reach or even surpass the government estimate of MOP130 billion.
In the first half of this year, the city’s casinos have garnered about MOP80 billion in GGR.
At the same time, Wong also took the opportunity to highlight his company’s past and future investments in the city. He said that since 2002, Sands China has invested MOP125 billion in Macau. Looking into the coming decade, the company pledges to invest an additional MOP30 billion, which Wong described as “setting [a] new par for the industry.” The promised investments will also help Macau upgrade and diversify, the executive said.
