Macau’s obsession with visitor numbers is holding it back

Renato Marques

Macau has become addicted to a number – tourist arrivals.

Month after month, headlines celebrate visitor records as if they were a reliable measure of economic health. Policymakers proudly announce millions of arrivals, while businesses eagerly anticipate the next holiday surge.

Yet beneath the statistics lies an uncomfortable reality. More visitors do not necessarily translate into greater prosperity.

For a city as small and resource-constrained as Macau, pursuing volume is a flawed strategy.

Macau cannot win a price-based competition. It also cannot match neighboring destinations in scale, beaches, shopping districts, or natural attractions. Nor should it try.

Competing for the largest number of visitors inevitably means competing for the lowest spenders, placing pressure on infrastructure, public transportation, and local communities while delivering diminishing economic returns.

The city’s competitive advantage has never been affordability, but exclusivity.

Macau has become one of the wealthiest places in the world, not because it attracted the most tourists, but because it drew visitors who spent more than those in any other destination.

At some point, however, the conversation shifted. Success became synonymous with volume. The implicit assumption was that if 20 million visitors were good, 40 million must be better, and that our next goal should be 60 million.

The tourism industry should not be asking how to attract another 5 or 10 million visitors. It should ask how to persuade 500,000 travelers willing to stay an extra night, dine at the city’s restaurants, attend local entertainment, shop, visit the old districts, experience traditional shops, and leave feeling they have experienced something unavailable elsewhere.

The economic impact of those visitors would certainly exceed that of millions of budget-conscious half-day trippers.

There is now a trend of treating diversification as something requiring a diminished role for gaming in the local economy. I believe we should instead recognize that diversification means building on our competitive advantage, not pretending it does not exist or downgrading it.

Las Vegas, for instance, no longer depends solely on casinos, but it also does not apologize for them. Gaming remains a foundation for luxury hotels, Michelin-starred restaurants, conventions, concerts, sporting events, and high-end retail because its strongest asset was used as a foundation rather than treated as an embarrassment.

The diversification goal should not be to replace gaming but to elevate everything around it. Every business mentality should reinforce the proposition that “Macau offers a premium experience worth traveling to and paying for.”

But, of course, this also demands an uncomfortable shift in public policy. Naturally, the government prefers large visitor numbers because they are easy to measure and, let’s be honest, easy to achieve. It’s another of Macau’s infamous “quick fixes” and a fast track to the headlines.

Quality, on the other hand, is harder to quantify. Aspects such as customer satisfaction and international reputation require patience and sophisticated policymaking.

Macau is too small to build its future on mass tourism, and at some point, the marginal economic benefit of another group tour will be less than the cost of accommodating it.

What other city in the world measures itself by how many people cross the border each day? The future of Macau does not lie in imported political jargon but in its ability to convince the world that it offers something exceptional, something that cannot be replicated elsewhere and that deserves to be experienced.

Value is rarely created by being the cheapest, but by being the best.