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

Information from the Statistics and Census Service indicated that Macao saw 459,093 visitor arrivals in package tours in November 2007, up notably by 58.5% year-on-year. Visitors from Mainland China (331,741), Hong Kong (33,005) and Taiwan, China (25,183) recorded remarkable growth of 54.7%, 52.0% and 85.3% respectively compared with November 2006. In the first eleven months of 2007, visitors arrived in package tours surged by 46.1% over the same period of 2006 to 3,802,059. In November, the number of Macao residents travelling in package tours decreased by 27.5% year-on-year to 15,777. Mainland China, Japan and Thailand were the three most popular tour itineraries, which accounted for 74.5%, 6.6% and 5.7% of the total respectively. In the first eleven months of 2007, Macao residents travelling in package tours dropped by 24.0% over the same period of 2006 to 186,554. Meanwhile, 25,906 residents travelled under individual arrangements using services provided by travel agencies, which decreased by 14.9% over November 2006. Hong Kong (41.2%), Mainland China (29.8%) and Taiwan, China (9.8%) were the major destinations. In the first eleven months of 2007, Macao residents travelled under such arrangements increased by 7.4% compared with the same period of 2006 to 357,327. At the end of November 2007, the total number of guest rooms available in the hotel sector increased by 3,047 (+24.0%) from a year ago to 15,740 rooms. In November 2007, a total of 505,112 guests checked into hotels and similar establishments, representing a year-on-year growth of 13.9%. The average hotel occupancy rate soared by 8.2 percentage points to 85.8%, with 4-star hotels leading at 89.7%; in addition, the average length of stay of hotel guests extended by 0.3 night to 1.5 nights. The majority of the guests came from Mainland China (49.5%) and Hong Kong (24.9%). Number of hotel guests totalled 5,211,201 in the first eleven months of 2007, up by 24.1% over the same period of 2006. In the first eleven months of 2007, hotel guests (excluding Macao residents) accounted for 42.4% of the total number of tourists, up from 41.4% in the same period of 2006.