Golden Week visitors beat expectations

The Golden Week of the National Day holidays, which followed the mid-autumn festival holiday, has so far delivered visitor arrivals surpassing about 27% of the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) forecast.

During the first six days (up to 9 p.m. on Oct. 4), 763,501 visitors entered Macau via the different border posts.

The strongest day for visitor influx was recorded on the second day of the holidays (Sept. 30) when 158,633 entered Macau.

During the same period, the average daily figure reached 127,250, 27.2% more than the 100,000 forecasted by the MGTO.

On several occasions over these days, security authorities enforced pedestrian traffic crowd control measures around the Ruins of St. Paul’s, which was, as usual, the most crowded area of the city.

Several other measures to control pedestrian traffic in the central district were prepared but were not deployed over this period.

Besides the entry and exit of visitors, the border posts also registered, as expected, a high movement of local residents.

Oct. 2 recorded the most border movements with a total aggregate of arrivals and departures at all Macau checkpoints of 630,589. Of these, 208,073 (33%) were related to entries and exits of local residents.

By far, the Border Gate continued to be top of the list of entry ports with the most arrivals, seconded by the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge and the Hengqin Port checkpoint.

Foreign visitation growing

Regarding one of Macau’s main goals, the total number of foreign visitors to Macau (up to 9 p.m. on Oct. 4) was 38,608, a number that represents 5.2% of all tourist entries.

Although the figure still seems a small percentage compared with the total, it is clear that foreigner visitation is growing as this figure was only 2.1% during the holidays of Ching Ming and Easter in early April and 3.8% of all the visitors to Macau in the first five months of this year.