Macau Visitor Numbers Hit Almost 100k In First Three Days

The annual Labour Day holidays in the first week of May, traditionally presents Macau’s gaming operators with a lucrative commercial opportunity. In previous years, visitors have poured into the city-state, descending onto its famous casino strip en masse. However, since the onset of COVID, the annual May celebrations, which the Chinese government decided to extend to a three rather than five-day break due to ongoing internal travel disruption, have reaped scant reward for Macau’s casino concessionaires.

The footfall data for the first three days of the event has already emerged, and doesn’t make for particularly pleasant reading for the special administrative region’s gambling stakeholders. The holiday officially commenced on Saturday 30^th April, with day one visitor figures levels encouraging, at just over 40,000. However, the second and third days returned far less than satisfactory results, charting numbers of approximately 26k and 25k respectively.

The visitation statistics, released by the territory’s Public Security Police, do not compare favourably to past years. Although this is to be somewhat expected given current challenging circumstances, the fact that these numbers represent a noticeable drop-off from 2021 levels will create considerable concern. At this stage last year, the state was experiencing the apparent height of the pandemic, and therefore subject to draconian COVID curbs. However, fast-forward a year, and Macau is still struggling to shake-off a series of Chinese imposed restrictions.

In the first three days of the 2019 May celebrations, over half a million visitors streamed into Macau, with the majority of these arrivals coming from Mainland China. Despite currently having a quarantine-free travel arrangement with Beijing, the region was clearly a huge distance away from hitting the kinds of numbers delivered in the last full year before the coronavirus pandemic.