Information from the Statistics and Census Service indicated that visitor arrivals in package tours increased by 16.3% year-on-year to 464,370 in February 2010. Visitors from Mainland China (336,551); Japan (21,944); Taiwan, China (21,456); and Hong Kong (19,922) rose by 9.4%, 17.3%, 47.2% and 5.4% respectively. Moreover, visitors from Republic of Korea (13,838), Malaysia (10,105), India (5,194) and Vietnam (5,099) also registered notable increase. In the first two months of 2010, visitor arrivals in package tours rose up by 12.9% year-on-year to 923,277. The number of Macao residents travelling outbound in package tours soared by 63.4% year-on-year to 20,198 on account of the Lunar New Year fell in February this year, with Mainland China (57.7% of total), Hong Kong (10.1%) and Japan (7.6%) being the most popular tour itineraries. In the first two months of 2010, Macao residents travelling in package tours totalled 33,040, up by 8.3 % year-on-year. Meanwhile, outbound residents travelling under individual arrangements using services of travel agencies also surged by 36.4% year-on-year to 37,475; the main destinations were Hong Kong (49.2% of total), Mainland China (26.0%) and Taiwan, China (10.4%). In the first two months of 2010, outbound residents travelling under such arrangements rose by 15.1% year-on-year to 65,946. At the end of February 2010, total number of available guest rooms of the hotel sector increased by 1,360 (+7.7%) year-on-year to 18,937 rooms. A total of 578,877 guests checked into hotels and guest-houses in February 2010, up by 12.3% year-on-year, with the majority coming from Mainland China (54.6% of total) and Hong Kong (20.7%). The average occupancy rate of the hotels and guest-houses increased by 8.5 percentage points year-on-year to 77.8% and that of the hotels reached 78.5%, with 3-star hotels leading at 82.2%. The average length of stay of the guests increased by 0.2 night to 1.5 nights. The cumulative number of guests reached 1,243,276 in the first two months of 2010, up by 19.5% over the same period of 2009. In the first two months of 2010, visitor-guests of hotels and guest-houses accounted for 59.4% of the total number of tourists, slightly lower than 60.3% in the same period of 2009.
