Visitor numbers in Macau are likely to strengthen during the Christmas season despite the relatively cold weather in southern China, and representatives for the Chinese gaming and travel sector each commented to GGRAsia, saying it was not a holiday season in mainland China, Macau’s main tourist source market.
According to the State Council of China, mainland China will make this Monday, Jan. 1, a public holiday and the weekend before that a public holiday. Hong Kong, a neighboring special administrative region of Macau, will make Christmas (Dec. 25) and the following day a public holiday for a quarter of Macau’s monthly visitors, and Lunar New Year will also make it a public holiday.
“We still see quite a few mainland Chinese travelers coming and going in Macau these days,” said Hoffman Ma Ho Man, vice president of Success Universe Group Ltd, an investor at Ponte 16, a casino resort located in Macau’s inner port.
“Macao and Hong Kong both have a stronger Christmas atmosphere, appealing to mainland Chinese visitors as a destination,” Ma told GGRAsia.
He added: “Game sponsor traffic in December has been fine so far. Fonte 16 runs the game under the license of Macau Concessionaire SJM Holdings Ltd.
For his resort, which has a Sofitel-branded five-star hotel, rooms have already been booked “80%” since Saturday (23 December), Ponte 16 president added.
He saw some “parallelities” with the August summer holiday season in terms of December visitor numbers and total game revenue (GGR).
Macau received more than 3.22 million visitors in August, a monthly record for 2023 through the end of November, according to available data from the Macau Statistics Office.
August was the second-best month so far in 2023 by casino GGR, reaching an MOP of $17.21 billion ($2.1 billion). The monthly record for the first 11 months was October, when the city generated an MOP of $19.5 billion in GGR.
JPMorgan Securities (Asia Pacific) suggested in a note Monday that the overall GGR for December could reach a daily utilization rate of around MOP17 billion, or MOP500 billion.
In an op-ed to GGRAsia, Andy Wu, president of the Macau Travel Industry Council, said the average hotel share in Macau after Christmas could reach “80%,” and that in the Kotai resort could be even higher because of the special attraction being held for travelers.
Macau is expected to have a high hotel share despite having about 20% more rooms, or nearly 46,000 hotel rooms, compared with 38,000 in 2019.
BY: 동행복권파워볼