Macau ranked 7th on ECA’s most expensive cities for business travelers in 2015

Macau has been placed seventh on the ECA International annual ranking for the most expensive cities in Asia Pacific for business travelers in 2015. On this same list Hong Kong was ranked first.
To determine the annual rankings, International Human Resource Consulting and Expatriate Management ECA International studied a combination of living and lodging costs.
As mentioned in the ECA report, the result comes from “Daily Rates research” that aims to study “business trip costs such as accommodation, meals, drinks, laundry, taxi fares, and other day-to-day necessities.”
The ranking places Hong Kong as the most expensive city, followed by Dhaka, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore and Busan ahead of Macau.
The same report found the results to be driven primarily by accommodation rates. Hong Kong has daily rates that are at least 20 percent higher (in four-star hotel accommodation) than Singapore.
In order to establish a real comparison on the accountability of hotel rates in the final results, the company developed a comparative ranking that did not take into account the cost of accommodation. In this ranking, Macau drops from 7th to 14th position and Hong Kong drops to 8th position, with Seoul ranked first. Tokyo and Sydney are ranked second and third on the list, respectively, with Sydney climbing eight spots with the exclusion.
Explaining the results, Lee Quane, regional director – Asia for ECA International said, “Seoul and Tokyo’s high rankings are a reflection of the general high cost of goods and services in these two cities, combined with the fact that language issues may limit business travellers in terms of their choices for meals out.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum sits Kuala Lumpur as the cheapest location in Asia Pacific for business travel.
The cheapest locations in the region for business travelers, once hotel costs are excluded, are Karachi, Islamabad, Kathmandu and Ulaanbaatar, with costs in Karachi approximately 33 percent less than in Seoul.  RM