Information from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) indicated that benefited from the National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival holidays, visitors on package tours rose by 16.3% year-on-year to 799,000 in October 2017, with a month-to-month increase of 6.0%. Package tour visitors from Mainland China (647,000), the Republic of Korea (40,000) and Taiwan (43,000) went up by 17.0%, 29.2% and 11.8% respectively year-on-year. In the first ten months of 2017, visitors on package tours totalled 6,804,000, up by 11.5% year-on-year.
Outbound residents using services of travel agencies increased by 18.7% year-on-year to 123,000. Residents travelling on package tours grew by 23.2% to 48,000, with those going to Mainland China (30,000) rising by 11.5%. In the first ten months of 2017, outbound residents using services of travel agencies totalled 1,140,000, up by 11.7% year-on-year.
There were 108 hotels & guesthouses operating at the end of October 2017, an increase of 1 year-on-year. Number of guest rooms increased by 2.0% year-on-year to 37,000, with 5-star hotel rooms rising by 2.6% to 22,000, accounting for 60.4% of the total.
Number of guests of hotels & guesthouses in October 2017 edged up by 0.3% year-on-year to 1,093,000. Guests coming from Mainland China (738,000) rose by 5.5% year-on-year, and those from the Republic of Korea (47,000) surged by 86.5%; meanwhile, guests from Hong Kong (110,000) and Taiwan (39,000) dropped by 29.4% and 1.3% respectively. The average length of stay of guests went up by 0.1 night year-on-year to 1.5 nights. The average occupancy rate of hotels & guesthouses stood at 88.2%, up by 4.1 percentage points year-on-year, with 5-star hotels (89.8%) and 4-star hotels (89.1%) recording relatively high rates in October, up by 4.9 percentage points and 1.2 percentage points respectively year-on-year.
In the first ten months of 2017, guests of hotels & guesthouses totalled 10,817,000, up by 11.3% year-on-year. The average occupancy rate of hotels & guesthouses rose by 3.8 percentage points to 86.0%. The average length of stay of guests went up by 0.1 night year-on-year to 1.5 nights. Visitor-guests accounted for 72.2% of the total overnight visitors, up slightly by 0.6 percentage points year-on-year.