Visits to Macau up almost 30% in October

Visitation is still down by 81.9 per cent year-on-year.

Macau.- The Golden Week celebration, the Macau GP and the local Food Festival helped increase visitation to the city in October.

The Macau Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) says that the number of arrivals grew by 29.6 per cent month-to-month to 581,986 in October 2020.

The figure is still down by 81.9 per cent year-on-year.

Overnight visitors and same-day visitors totalled 308,222 and 273,764 respectively, the DSEC said.

The average length of stay went up by 0.2 days year-on-year to 1.4 days. The average length of stay of overnight visitors (2.7 days) rose by 0.3 days year-on-year.

In October, there were 37,909 visitors from Hong Kong and 4,574 from Taiwan.

The number of visitors from mainland China was down 77 per cent year-on-year at 539,482, with those travelling under the Individual Visit Scheme (IVS) amounting to only 174,002.

Due to a rise in Covid-19 cases, authorities in Macau have decided to impose quarantine on visitors coming from some areas in China.

In the first ten months of 2020, the number of visitor arrivals to Macau declined by 86.2 per cent year-on-year to 4,601,090.

The slow increase in visitation is in part due to a strategy of attracting larger international crowds to the city through organising big events such as the Macau Grand Prix, which took place last week.