Macau sees increased visitors in lead-up to Lunar New Year
Following the lifting of travel restrictions on January 8, there was an increase in visitors to the region
The COVID-19 pandemic continued to impact travel in Macau in 2022, with the number of visitors falling by 26% year-on-year to 5.7 million, according to the Statistics and Census Service. Overnight visitors and same-day visitors fell by 41.8% and 62.5% year-on-year respectively.
In December 2022, visitor arrivals to Macau rose by 6.2% month-on-month. Following the lifting of travel restrictions on January 8 2023, there was a further increase in the number of visitors to the region. Over the three-day Lunar New Year holiday period (January 21-23), Macau saw 154,273 visitors entering from across the borders. This number represents an increase of 341.8% compared to the same three-day period the previous year, but falls far short when compared to the 400,710 people that visited Macau during the holiday in 2019.
The number of visitors from mainland China in 2022 slid by 55.9% year-on-year to 336,593. Visitors from the nine cities in the Pearl River Delta in the Greater Bay Area totalled 194,992, of whom 42.7% came from Zhuhai. Besides, there were 42,860 visitors from Hong Kong and 6,679 from Taiwan. The average length of stay of visitors extended by 0.6 day year-on-year to 2.1 days, with that of overnight visitors (3.6 days) and same-day visitors (0.2 day) increasing by 0.6 day and 0.1 day respectively.
Analyzed by checkpoint, number of visitor arrivals by land fell by 24.4% year-on-year to 5,293,108 in 2022; among them, 73.5% arrived through the checkpoint of Border Gate (3,891,367) and 16.8% came via the Hengqin port (887,160). Meanwhile, visitor arrivals by air and by sea totaled 241,186 and 166,045 respectively.
