Report claims city’s hotel booking exceeds 2019’s Golden Week

Qunar, one of mainland China’s major online travel agencies, has reportedly revealed that bookings for Macau hotels for the first day of this National Day Holiday have exceeded those of the same day last year, contradicting various other statistics which have been revealed to the local community.
Qunar is the subsidiary company of Ctrip, specializing in providing users with the cheapest offers of hotels and flights compared to other mainland Chinese online travel agencies.
On October 2, state-owned media channel CCTV2 Finance titled one of its reports with the headline “Macau becomes a popular tourism destination.” CCTV2 Finance said that “during the long holiday, Macau has become a hot tourism destination, with bookings for Macau hotels rocketing” amid the National Day Holiday.
“For October 1, bookings for Macau hotels already exceed previous years,” the CCTV report says without revealing the exact statistics. The news report cited Qunar as the source for its statistics.
“As the holiday continues, Macau tourism will encounter a new peak,” the report says.
According to sources previously contacted by the Times, a popular hotel on the Cotai Strip was said to be fully booked, while two other five-star hotels had 400 rooms and 600 rooms, from a little over 2,000 rooms, booked prior to the start of the national holiday.
However, earlier reports suggest Macau hotels are seeing an average hotel occupancy rate of between 30% and 40%.
The MGTO has a target of just 50% hotel occupancy during this holiday, as it is only expecting 12,000 to 16,000 daily visitor arrivals.
According to a report by Sina Corp, on Qunar, Macau’s hotel bookings in August increased 1.18 times compared with July. 51% of bookings were made by tourists whose permanent residence is in Guangdong province.
As of September 15, Macau’s hotel bookings in the last month increased by 86% compared to the entire month of August. The percentage of bookers from Guangdong province reached 47%. Since September 15, the number of bookings for Macau-related products on Qunar has shown a trend of rapid growth. Sina also noted that the daily increase in bookings exceeds 10%.