Package Tours and Hotel Occupancy Rate for March 2009

Information from the Statistics and Census Service indicated that Macao registered 551,010 visitor arrivals in package tours in March 2009, up by 30.9% from a year earlier. Visitors from Mainland China (437,565) and Taiwan, China (26,650) increased substantially by 43.5% and 39.4% year-on-year, and those from Japan (17,687), Thailand (12,248) and Malaysia (11,772) also rose by 17.7%, 19.1% and 16.7% respectively; however, visitors from Hong Kong (19,945) decreased by 16.3%. In the first quarter of 2009, visitor arrivals in package tours grew by 14.3% over the same period of 2008 to 1,368,556. In March 2009, the number of Macao residents travelling outbound in package tours dropped by 17.7% year-on-year to 17,004. Mainland China (75.9%); Taiwan, China (6.6%) and Japan (5.5%) were the most popular tour itineraries. In the first quarter of 2009, residents travelling in package tours decreased by 10.8 % over the same period of 2008 to 47,499. Meanwhile, residents travelling outbound under own arrangements with services of travel agencies totalled 31,956, up by 10.6% over March 2008. Hong Kong (35.1%), Mainland China (32.6%) and Taiwan, China (14.8%) were the major destinations. In the first quarter of 2009, outbound residents travelling under such arrangements dropped by 2.6% year-on-year to 89,250. At the end of March 2009, the number of guest rooms available in the hotel sector increased by 1,345 (+8.3%) from a year earlier to 17,534 rooms. In March 2009, a total of 596,206 guests checked into hotels and similar establishments, up by 5.9% year-on-year, with the majority of guests coming from Mainland China (55.7%) and Hong Kong (18.7%). The average hotel occupancy rate decreased by 3.1 percentage points year-on-year to 72.6%, with 4-star hotels leading at 86.4%. The average length of stay of hotel guests decreased slightly by 0.01 night to 1.3 nights. Total number of hotel guests reached 1,636,504 in the first quarter of 2009, up by 1.7% over the same period of 2008. In the first quarter of 2009, visitor-guests of hotels accounted for 61.9% of the total number of tourists, up from 55.2% in the corresponding period of 2008.