Macau received just under 1.56 million visitors in the full nine days of the Chinese New Year holiday season designated by authorities on the Chinese mainland, the main source market for the city’s tourists.
The tally is a preliminary figure based on data from Macau’s Public Security Police, the agency responsible for monitoring the city’s immigration checkpoints.
As per the data, the city received an average of 172,783 visitors per day from February 15 to 23 inclusive, the mainland holiday period declared by China’s State Council.
Chinese New Year this time – the Year of the Horse – fell on February 17, and each lunar new year celebration is usually a peak business period for the tourism and gaming industries in Macau.
The police did not supply a breakdown on holiday-period visitors’ respective place of origin. However, the majority of tourists for the aggregate of the nine days entered Macau via one of three routes. They were: the Border Gate checkpoint (609,547 arrivals) that links to the neighbouring mainland city of Zhuhai; the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (328,881 arrivals); or the Hengqin checkpoint (294,479 arrivals).
Separate information provided by Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) indicated that just over 1.08-million of the visitors that entered the city in the first eight days of the festive break – i.e., February 15 to 22 – were from mainland China. Another 227,032 of the visitors in the first eight days came from Hong Kong, showed the MGTO data.
