Visitor arrivals slump 76.5% boding ill for economy

Visitor arrivals over the first six days of the week-long Chinese Lunar New Year period slumped 76.5% year-on-year to just 243,200, according to official data, with those from mainland China, Macau’s largest source market, declining 81.7% over the same period.

Authorities in mainland China this week announced the suspension of individual travel visas for visits to Macau by mainland residents. The opening hours of the city’s border checkpoints have been narrowed and hundreds of inbound and outbound flights to Macau were canceled in recent days.

The extent of the damage to the casino business, the lifeblood of the local economy, will start to be known only early next week, when the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau is due to release its monthly gross gaming revenue report for January. Many small businesses and their employees depend on the casino sector.

Gross gaming revenue in January 2019 dropped 5% from a year earlier to 24.9 billion patacas.

The downturn in visitor arrivals may not translate into a proportionate decline in gross gaming revenue because of the relative weight of the VIP segment, where just a few players bet large sums of money. Moreover, the factors that encourage or discourage mass market visitation may not influence the tendency of VIP gamblers to visit.

Visitor arrivals grew 10% last year to reach 39.4 million, stopping just shy of the symbolic 40-million level previously earmarked as the city’s maximum carrying capacity.

The growth was inflated by the opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge in October 2018, which fueled a rapid rise in same-day visitors last year. Staying on average just 0.2 days or less than three hours in the city, the number of same-day visitors soared 20% in 2019, while overnight visitors climbed just 0.8% in the same period.

With the year-on-year comparisons now easing, Macau’s tourism board chief Helena de Senna Fernandes earlier predicted visitor arrivals would drop 3% this year. That prediction had not accounted for the coronavirus impact on mainland visitation this month.

Daniel Beitler