Two more encouraging Macao tourism data points

Filed Under Macau, Macao, Cotai, TOURISM

I dont even bother writing about the monthly Macau “visitation up 45%” announcements we see month after month. Sure they’re huge numbers and Macao’s tourism industry is certainly booming, but after a while those big numbers lose their dramatic effect.

So I usually try to find news that scratch below the surface and show important points with a slightly different bend. Today I have two items that show, yes, Macao tourism is booming, and yes, Macao is doing it the right way.
The first item is that Macao visitor volumes are now beating out Hong Kong, the other high-end alternative for Mainland Chinese:

In the first quarter of the year Macau received 230,788 more visitors than Hong Kong, according to official figures from the Hong Kong tourist office obtained by Portuguese news agency Lusa.

According to the same figures, between January and March 2008, Macau received 7,506,309 visitors as compared with 7,275,521 visitors to Hong Kong. The Hong Kong tourist market grew by 10 percent in the first quarter of this year whilst in Macau it grew by 17.9 percent. In March alone, whilst Macau received 2,713,457 visitors,, Hong Kong registered 2,404,499.

Despite having overtaken Hong Knog in the number of visitors, the Macau tourist market is more dependent on the Chinese mainland than Hong Kong’s as, according to official figures from both territories, Macau received 4.38 million mainland Chinese visitors, whilst Hong Kong received 4.15 million. Around 2 million visitors (a rise 3.28 percent) to Macau in the first quarter were from Hong Kong, whilst just 153,904 people travelled in the opposite direction (a rise of 8.8 percent).

The Macau tourism market grew 22.8 percent in 2007 to 27 million people as compared with growth of 11.6 percent for Hong Kong and a total of 28.17 million visitors.

The second item is that Macau is starting to do what is crucial if the Cotai Strip is going to be successful - diversify! The Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong residents are probably not the ones that will be filling up the 30,000 hotel rooms night after night on Cotai. You need to bring in tourists from Japan, Australia, and non-traditional places like India, where there’s 1 billion people with nowhere to gamble (dont you feel sorry for them).

Here is an excerpt from The Economic Times:

There has been an astonishing 94.4% growth rate in the number of tourists that visited this former Portuguese colony, a 50-minute ferry ride from Hong Kong, in the first three months of the year. Last year, 7,307 Indians visited this South China Sea facing territory in the first quarter of the year. This year the number was almost double at 14,208.

It has been a steadily increasing graph. In 2007, 45,473 Indians visited Macau, which now rivals Nevada in gambling revenue, a growth of 57.33% from 2006 when the number was merely 28,903.

This has been credited to people coming to the island first to attend conferences or seminars and, then, after “falling madly in love with the place”, bringing their families for a second visit or choosing to come alone to sample the night life or just gambling away in the Las Vegas style of casinos.

I know, these are still relatively small numbers, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Word of mouth will help, publicity will help, and the conferences and conventions on the Cotai Strip will help as well. There is no doubt in this bloggers mind that Macao and the Cotai Strip has everything necessary to make this a truley international destination.

Note: Cotai Strip is a trademark of Las Vegas Sands Corp.