August hotel guests down 10.4% y-o-y

August hotel guest numbers declined 10.4% year-on-year to 390,000, data from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) shows.

Mainland guests (263,000) and local guests (104,000) fell 11.4% and 5.0% respectively.

The August average occupancy rate of guest rooms dropped 2 percentage points year-on-year to 36.4%.

In the first eight months of this year, the average occupancy rate of hotel guest rooms decreased 12.9 percentage points year-on-year to 37.6%. The number of guests went down by 26.5% year-on-year to 3,313,000.

The travel sector is optimistic about the upcoming figures due to the weekend announcement that the central government is set to reinstate group tours from mainland China as soon as late October, along with the reinstatement of digital travel endorsement applications.

Tours will restart gradually from the provinces of Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Fujian and the municipality of Shanghai, with Guangdong being the frontier.

The tourism bureau has also renewed its efforts to attract mainland visitors for the coming National Day Golden Week – a seven-day holiday in China and a typically busy week for Macau pre-pandemic.

Meanwhile, in the first eight months of this year, the number of local tour visitors decreased 40.0% year-on-year to 20,000, while Macau residents purchasing outbound services through travel agencies plunged 81% to 24,000. LV