Macau's visitor numbers
Macau reportedly saw a 3% year-on-year increase in visitor numbers last month as just over 2.56 million people traveled to enjoy the vast swaths of shops, hotels and casinos of its former Portuguese enclave.
According to official data from the city statistics office, September's figures represented a 24.7% decline when the total of nearly 3.41 million cases in the previous month was excluded due to the overall decline caused by Typhoon Manghut.
Macau welcomed 1.41 million overnight tourists in September, up 1.9% year-on-year, while same-day visits rose about 4.4% to just over 1.15 million, according to an official analysis. The 30-day period also reportedly reached 1.4 days, an increase of 0.1 days in average stay, while the overnight tally improved by 0.2 days to 2.4 days.
GGRAcia reported that while second-ranked Hong Kong recorded a 1.6% decline with 444,005 guests, mainland China remained the most common source of tourists with over 1.82 million, up 5.7% year-on-year. In addition, the number of visitors to Korea recorded a 4.4 percent drop in the month to 58,246, while Taiwan's tally of 82,999 showed a 3.7 percent drop.
However, figures from Statistics Korea showed that in September, visitors from the U.S. and Britain to Macau increased to 13,448 and 4,108, respectively, compared to the previous year, while the total number of tourists from Australia and Canada decreased to 6,614 and 4,326.
Tourists and analyses from mainland China showed that tourists were mainly from Guangdong (719,062) and Hunan (91,921). On the other hand, the number of individual city visits in September was 788,426, up 10.3% from the same period last year.
The September figures from the Statistics Survey, analyzed by transportation, showed about 1.55 million tourists traveled by land to Macau, up 9.6% year-on-year, while the ferry-based tally fell 11.8% to 757,946. The situation is expected to continue tomorrow as the planned opening of the 34-mile Hong Kong-Zuhai-Macao Bridge will reduce travel time for Hong Kong visitors from about three hours to less than 30 minutes.
The September analysis means Macau welcomed about 25.81 million visitors in the first nine months of 2018, up more than 8.3% year-on-year as mainland China contributed just over 18.22 million tourists.