Visitor arrivals plunged 95% in February

Visitor arrivals plunged 95% in February, the same month that Macau casinos faced an unprecedented 15-day shutdown amid an outbreak of the novel coronavirus in mainland China.
About 156,000 people visited Macau last month, according to official data disseminated by the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC), down 95.6% in year-on-year terms.
As one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, Macau received on average more than 3 million tourists per month last year. Tourists from the greater China region made up the bulk of Macau visitation last year, accounting for over 92% of the 39.4 million visitors.
In December 2019, the last month unaffected by the coronavirus outbreak, mainland visitors to Macau totaled 2.09 million and accounted for 67% of all tourists, while those from the neighboring city of Hong Kong accounted for 21%.
The mainland continued to be Macau’s primary visitor source market in February, but its share of visitors dropped to 46% of the total. Visitors from Hong Kong shot up to nearly 40%.
In February, the average length of stay of visitors increased more than doubled to 2.8 days, attributed by DSEC a growth in the proportion of overnight stays among mainland visitors. The average duration for overnight visitors surged from 2.1 days in February last year to 5.4 days while that for same-day visitors dropped from 0.2 days to 0.1 days, the data shows.
China temporarily suspended the popular Individual Visit Scheme in late January as the country came to terms with the scale of the Covid-19 outbreak.
The scheme allows mainland Chinese to apply for a single-use travel permit to visit Macau or Hong Kong without the need to join a tour group. Without the scheme, there are few ways for a mainland resident to visit Macau for tourism purposes.
Having largely suppressed the growth in new Covid-19 cases on the mainland, some analysts predict that Beijing will lift the suspension in either April or May.
The collapse in visitation comes as gross gaming revenue plummeted 87.8% last month to just 3.1 billion patacas in the steepest year-on-year decline since the establishment of the Macau Special Administrative Region in 1999.
Visitor arrivals and gross gaming revenue are only loosely correlated because of the influence of the volatile VIP casino segment. Analysts told the Times last month that the VIP segment would likely be the first to area to recover.