Mainland China, Macau's most important supply market for gaming and tourism, accounted for 6.3 million people, or about 71% of the total, in the three months to March 31.
The daily average of 69,239 mainland Chinese visitors is up nearly 95% from a year ago, nearly 84% in the first quarter of 2019 before the pandemic.
Xi'an and Qingdao are two Chinese cities that have been added to China's departure visa system for independent travelers traveling to Macau and Hong Kong starting March 6 and are known as individual visit plans.
From January to March, Macau had 47,000 visitors from Xi'an and 24,000 from Qingdao, MGTO said, which is 6.4% and 44.5% higher than the same period in 2019, respectively. Combined, the two represent just 1.1% of all visitors from the mainland.
Hong Kong, which came second only to the mainland as Macau's source market, supplied the city with nearly 1.82 million visitors in the first quarter. That was 101.4% in the same period in 2019, when Macau received 1.79 million visitors from Hong Kong.
The number of arrivals from overseas markets, excluding Greater China, reached more than 580,000 in the first quarter. That's equivalent to about 6,400 international visitors a day, nearly 68% of the same quarter in 2019, it said in an announcement on Thursday.
The international travelers came from China's neighbors the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. India and South Korea and Japan also represented, MGTO said, citing public security police figures. Numbers per market were not mentioned.
In comments to local media at Thursday's event, MGTO Director Maria Helena de Sena Fernandez said she was "confident" that the Macau tourism authority would attract more than 2 million international travelers in 2024. There, she also predicted that Macau would attract 130,000 visitors daily during the upcoming May festival, a holiday in mainland China.
BY: 검빛경마
