Macau expects summer spike in IVS tourists from mainland China

Macau’s travel industry is anticipating a summer spike in Individual Visit Scheme (IVS) tourists from mainland China, according to Andy Wu Keng Kuong, president of the Macau Travel Industry Council.

According to Macao Daily News, Wu cites several factors as contributing to the expected surge, including the recent addition of eight new mainland cities to the IVS scheme.

Effective yesterday, Taiyuan, Hohhot, Harbin, Lhasa, Lanzhou, Xining, Yinchuan, and Urumqi have become active members of the IVS program, which allows mainland Chinese residents to visit Macau individually without the need for a tour group. While Wu acknowledged that these newly eligible cities in the northwest and northeast regions of China are unlikely to be major contributors to Macau’s tourism volume compared to the neighboring Guangdong province, he noted that visitors from the far north are more likely to stay overnight, as they have traveled a greater distance.

The IVS scheme has seen its first update since the pre-pandemic era, with the addition of two large mainland population centers, Qingdao and Xi’an, in a move announced by China’s State Council just three months ago. Data from Macau’s Statistics and Census Service shows that during the first four months of 2024, these two cities contributed a combined 86,000 visitors to Macau, representing 1.07% of the 8.03 million mainland Chinese arrivals.

Of the 8.03 million mainland visitors in the January-April period, nearly 53.1% or 4.26 million utilized IVS permits. The top three mainland markets supplying IVS travelers to Macau were Guangdong province (2.83 million), Shanghai (321,074), and Beijing (189,194).

The IVS-traveler volume for the first four months of 2024 represented a recovery rate of 88.78% compared to the same period in 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the census service data.

While the newly added IVS cities are not expected to be major contributors to Macau’s tourism in the short term, their inclusion in the scheme, coupled with the continued strength of the traditional IVS markets, suggests a promising summer season for the city’s hospitality and leisure industries, according to Wu. Staff reporter