Despite the recent collapse of budget airline Viva Macau, the city’s government appears to be stepping up efforts to boost air travel to the casino destination.
Visitor arrivals by air (including via the heliport at Macau Maritime Ferry Terminal) rose by 9.8 percent year on year to 573,512 in the first four months of 2010, according to Macau’s Statistics and Census Service (DSEC). Arrivals at Macau International Airport went up by 10.4 percent to 566,691, with the majority coming from Taiwan (36.3 percent); mainland China (29.6 percent); and Malaysia (8.0 percent).
The possibility of running charter flights to and from Shantou, Chaozhou and Guiyang in the eastern part of the mainland’s Guangdong province (next door to Macau) was discussed on a visit to the People’s Republic of China last week by Macau’s Chief Executive Fernando Chui, reports the Macau Daily Times.
Mr Chui told reporters that during the trip he had talked about opening charter and direct flight services to the three cities to boost “the flow of people, logistics as well as the exchange of business and culture”.
He added the air services would be first launched in the form of charter flights, and when the passenger volumes grow to a certain level scheduled flights would be arranged.
Shantou is little known outside China but had a population of 4.9 million at the time of the last official census in 2006. That’s equivalent to the entire population of metropolitan Berlin, the capital of Germany, as recorded in September 2009.
Chaozhou has 2.5 million inhabitants and Guiyang is home to 3.9 million people. Though only a fraction of these populations are likely to be economically eligible to gamble in Macau, it still means the three cities alone offer a potential hinterland of 11.3 million people. That’s a potential customer base greater than the entire population of Portugal, the power that administered Macau for 450 years until its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1999.
If Guangdong province were a country, it would be the eleventh most populous on Earth. The official number of inhabitants is 113 million (the real figure is probably in excess of this). That’s only 14 million people shy of the entire population of Japan and greater than the population of Mexico.
