Macau welcomed more than 30,000 visitors on a recent Friday, and expects an even higher daily tally for the annual Golden Week holiday, which begins October 1.
Lei Wai Nong, the city’s Secretary for Economy and Finance, recently told local media that the number of visitor arrivals recorded September 9 was just short of 32,000, higher than the daily average in the first half of 2020. According to GGRAsia, it was the highest number since August 3, when the government announced that a local family of four had tested positive for the highly-infectious Delta variant of Covid-19.
Between September 3 and 9, the city welcomed more than 168,300 visitors for a daily average of about 24,000, up 82.2 percent from the August average, according to the tourism bureau. Officials will launch promotional events and advertising “to show that Macau is a safe place to travel,” Lei said.
Removal of inbound “travel impediments,” including from Mainland China, aren’t likely until 2022, said a note from brokerage Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd. “In the short-term, we expect GGR improvement to begin in the fourth quarter, but more significant travel impediment removals are not likely until next year,” wrote analysts Vitaly Umansky, Louis Li, and Kelsey Zhu.
They added: “We expect September GGR to reach mid-30s of percent of 2019 GGR,” with “October reaching approximately 40 percent of 2019. Golden Week could be a wild card and will have impact on stock prices, but investor expectations at this stage are muted.”
The brokerage expected Macau’s full-year GGR for 2021 to be 34 percent of 2019’s, with “mass rising to over 41 percent of 2019,” but with VIP being below 25 percent of 2019 levels.
“We expect mass to recover to above 2019 levels in 2023 and then achieve low double digit growth as the structural mass/premium mass drivers remain in place,” wrote the analysts. “VIP will continue to struggle, rising to only circa 50 percent of 2019 levels in 2023,” they added.
