Average stay was 2.2 days
February was a good month for tourism in Macau, with 3 million people visiting to kick off the Year of the Dog. It was the highest visitation since August 2014, just before a crackdown on corruption and money laundering kicked off a historic two-year decline in the gaming industry.
Overnight visitors for the month numbered 1.4 million, up 13.3 percent over February 2016. Same-day visitors came to 1.67 million, for a 32.6 percent increase. The average length of stay held steady at 2.2 days, reported GGRAsia.
Mainland Chinese visitors grew 37.3 percent to 2.23 million for the month while those traveling under the Individual Visit Scheme set a new single-month record, up 57.9 percent to 1.4 million. Mainland visitors came primarily from Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces and Shanghai.
Hong Kong visitors were up slightly at 0.1 percent year-on-year, while those from Korea and Taiwan dropped 13.4 percent and 8.4 percent respectively. The numbers were up 15 percent year-on-year for both January and February, said analysts from Morgan Stanley in a note.
Praveen K. Choudhary and Jeremy An said a 20 percent spike in GGR for the first two months of the year resulted from 24 percent growth in VIP and 16 percent increase in the mass market.
“We think VIP might be weaker than the market expected (owing to luck), while mass growth is much higher than expected,” the analysts said.
“More hotels and more hotel rooms have been opened and are showing high occupancy,” they continued, adding that they expect the openings of MGM Cotai, the newest resort on the Cotai Strip, and Morpheus, a new hotel that will open at City of Dreams Macau in mid-2018, will “drive the momentum.”
