Information from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) indicated that visitors on package tours totalled 532,000 in January 2017, down by 6.7% year-on-year and 25.4% month-to-month. Package tour visitors from Mainland China (402,000) dropped by 9.0% year-on-year, while those from the Republic of Korea (43,000) and Taiwan (33,000) rose by 21.3% and 4.7% respectively.
As the Lunar New Year that fell in February last year took place in January this year, outbound residents using services of travel agencies increased by 14.8% year-on-year to 117,000. Residents travelling on package tours went up by 25.6% year-on-year to 50,000, with 32,000 of them going to Mainland China (+11.2%), and those to the Republic of Korea (8,100), Japan (2,600) and Thailand (2,300) surging by 120.2%, 272.8% and 221.2% respectively.
There were 107 hotels & guesthouses operating at the end of January 2017, providing 36,000 guest rooms, of which 5-star hotels accounted for 60.1%. Number of guest rooms increased by 12.9% year-on-year, with that of 3-star hotels soaring by 116.7%.
Number of guests in hotels & guesthouses totalled 1,041,000 in January 2017, up by 15.6% year-on-year. Guests from Mainland China (679,000), the Republic of Korea (38,000) and Hong Kong (127,000) recorded double-digit growth, up by 17.1%, 35.9% and 12.9% respectively; meanwhile, those from Taiwan dropped by 1.3% to 40,000. The average length of stay of guests was 1.4 nights, same as in January 2016. The average occupancy rate of hotels & guesthouses stood at 81.6%, up by 4.4 percentage points year-on-year; the rates of 5-star (83.5%) and 4-star hotels (82.3%) exceeded 80.0%, up by 5.0 and 3.4 percentage points respectively. Visitor-guests accounted for 71.7% of the total overnight visitors, down by 2.5 percentage points year-on-year.