Visitor arrivals to Macau up 5.4% in first half of 2017

he first six months of 2017, visitor arrivals to Macau totalled nearly 15.6m, up by 5.4% from a year earlier, according to data released on Monday by the region’s Statistic and Census Service.

In June, the number of visitors to Macau amounted to 2.38m, up 0.9% from the prior-year period. The number of overnight visitors in June saw a 10.1% year-on-year increase to 1.35m, while the tally of same-day visitors declined by 9.1% to 1.03m.

The data showed a 1.8% year-on-year increase in the number of visitors from mainland China in June, to 1.54m. The number of mainland Chinese visitors travelling under the Individual Visit Scheme went up by 5.8% to 704,720.

Most mainland visitors arriving to Macau in June came from Guangdong province, totalling 625,932 tourists. The tally of visitors from Hong Kong, Macau’s second largest source of tourists after mainland China, dropped by 3.9% year-on-year to 491,687 for the month of June.

Despite the yearly increase in the number of overall visitor arrivals in June, that monthly tally presented a 7.5% decline on the May aggregate. There was a total of 2.57m of visitors arriving in Macau during May, a month that included a Chinese holiday period surrounding the May 1 Labour Day, and known as Golden Week.