Information from the Statistics and Census Service indicated that visitor arrivals in package tours increased by 4.2% year-on-year to 396,310 in October 2010. In comparison with October 2009, visitors from Mainland China (274,805), Hong Kong (21,283), Japan (17,745) and Republic of Korea (11,794) rose by 3.8%, 8.2%, 5.0% and 194.9% respectively. In addition, visitors in package tour from Malaysia (8,995) and India (7,506) also registered remarkable increase; however, those from Taiwan, China (22,056) decreased by 11.9%. In the first ten months of 2010, visitor arrivals in package tours went up by 30.2% year-on-year to 4,770,216. In October 2010, Macao residents travelling outbound in package tours rose by 21.2% year-on-year to 19,383, with Mainland China (78.1% of total); Taiwan, China (5.4%); Republic of Korea (3.7%) and Thailand (3.2%) being the most popular tour itineraries. In the first ten months of 2010, residents travelling in package tours totalled 206,214, up by 28.3% year-on-year. Meanwhile, outbound residents travelling under own arrangements using services of travel agencies fell slightly by 0.3% year-on-year to 46,426 and the main destinations were Hong Kong (31.4% of total); Mainland China (26.7%); Taiwan, China (17.3%) and Thailand (9.1%). In the first ten months of 2010, outbound residents travelling under such arrangements increased by 8.7% year-on-year to 408,997. At the end of October 2010, total number of available guest rooms of the hotel sector increased by 1,359 (+7.3%) year-on-year to 19,849 rooms. A total of 628,773 guests checked into hotels and guest-houses in October 2010, up by 8.2% year-on-year, with the majority coming from Mainland China (50.5% of total) and Hong Kong (21.9%). The average occupancy rate of hotels and guest-houses stood at 78.4%, up by 4.6 percentage points year-on-year; average occupancy rate of hotels was 79.0%, with 4-star hotels leading at 80.5%. The average length of stay of guests went up by 0.01 night to 1.5 nights. Number of guests reached 6,368,709 in the first ten months of 2010, up by 18.2% over the same period of 2009. In the first ten months of 2010, visitor-guests of hotels and guest-houses accounted for 60.6% of the total number of tourists, down from 61.0% in the same period of 2009.
