Results of the Package Tours and Hotel Occupancy Rate for August 2007

Information from the Statistics and Census Service indicated that in light of the Summer holidays, the number of visitor arrivals in package tours reached 387,518 in August 2007, which surged by 65.6% year-on-year. Visitors from Mainland China (282,834), Hong Kong (29,954) and Taiwan, China (27,753) recorded remarkable growth of 58.6%, 166.1% and 78.1% respectively compared with August 2006. In the first eight months of 2007, visitors arrived in package tours rose by 39.3% over the same period of 2006 to 2,664,390. In August, the number of Macao residents travelling in package tours dropped by 23.9% year-on-year to 25,978. Mainland China, Japan, and Thailand were the three most popular tour itineraries, which accounted for 72.3%, 7.1% and 6.2% of the total respectively. In the first eight months of 2007, Macao residents travelling in package tours dropped by 23.4% over the same period of 2006 to 145,339. Meanwhile, 53,597 residents travelled under individual arrangements using services provided by travel agencies, an increase of 33.9% over August 2006. Hong Kong (59.7%), Mainland China (16.0%) and Taiwan, China (11.7%) were the major destinations. In the first eight months of 2007, Macao residents travelled under such arrangements increased slightly by 0.8% compared with the same period of 2006 to 250,025. Along with the opening of a new hotel in August, at the end of August 2007, the total number of guest rooms available in the hotel sector increased further by 3,987 (+33.8%) from a year ago to 15,778 rooms. In August 2007, a total of 527,651 guests checked into hotels and similar establishments, representing a year-on-year growth of 25.7%. The average hotel occupancy rate rose by 9.5 percentage points to 83.7%, with 4-star hotels leading at 91.7%. The average length of stay of hotel guests increased by 0.08 night to 1.24 nights. The majority of the guests came from Mainland China (48.8%) and Hong Kong (31.5%). Number of hotel guests totalled 3,693,280 in the first eight months of 2007, up by 24.0% over the same period of 2006. In the first eight months of 2007, hotel guests (excluding Macao residents) accounted for 42.7% of the total number of tourists, up from 41.1% in the same period of 2006.