Arrivals to Macau reached an average of 22,000 on the first Friday and Saturday that Guangdong Province relaxed the validity of nucleic acid tests (NAT) to 48 hours, according to the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO).
MGTO director Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes described the situation as encouraging and expects the number of visitors coming into Macau to exceed 25,000 on individual days of the May Golden Week holiday.
Fernandes expects that visitors during the May Golden Week will mainly come from the Greater Bay Area and Guangdong Province, and that the authorities will focus their promotional efforts on Guangdong in the short term.
As for the earlier plan to promote Macau in the Greater Bay Area by caravan on a weekly basis, she said that the authorities had started to contact the relevant cities in Guangdong Province again and discussions were underway.
“As for the large-scale Macau Week event, some provinces and cities have also contacted the Macau authorities and both sides are now discussing it,” she revealed.
Forecasts for Macau’s visitor arrivals, economy and the gaming sector remain bleak – still due to the Covid-19 pandemic and strict border requirements.
However, the tourism bureau has said that it continues to strive to promote the city again in the mainland in the second half of the year.
Visitor arrivals fell by 30% y-o-y in March
The number of visitor arrivals fell by 30.2% year-on-year and 19.6% month-on-month in March 2022 due to the the resurgence of Covid-19 cases in neighboring regions, the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) announced Friday.
Last month, a total of 526,912 visitors arrived in Macau, with same-day visitors (369,661) growing by 5.7% year-on-year, whereas overnight visitors (157,251) declined by 61.2%.
Regarding the source of visitors, the number of visitors from mainland China went down by 31.9% year-on-year to 468,995, with 91,099 of them travelling under the Individual Visit Scheme. Visitors from the nine cities in the Pearl River Delta located in the Greater Bay Area totaled 314,517, of which 70.2% came from Zhuhai. There were 52,862 visitors from Hong Kong and 4,867 from Taiwan.
In the first quarter of 2022, the number of visitor arrivals increased by 8.0% year-on-year to 1,876,847. Same-day visitors (1,196,122) rose by 46.0% year-on-year, while overnight visitors (680,725) fell by 25.9%.
