The head of the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO), Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, says Macau should aim to add around 1,000 new hotel rooms each year in order to encourage more overnight visitation.
The conservative estimate was offered during an interview with Inside Asian Gaming on Wednesday in which she highlighted the need to increase supply given Macau’s limited hotel offerings and extremely high occupancy rates. Macau currently boasts only around 40,000 hotel rooms – a long way from the 175,000 on offer in Las Vegas – while the average annual occupancy rate sits at 83% across the whole market with higher end properties close to full capacity throughout the year.
While those figures suggest the need for greater capacity is urgent, Senna Fernandes said it is important to take a measured approach to the problem.
“You can’t build 10,000 rooms overnight,” she said. “I would say adding 1,000 to 2,000 new rooms every year would be a sustainable level of development because you also need to give people an opportunity to sell the rooms and use up that additional capacity. A rate of increase of 1,000 rooms per year would be a good number to increase supply but allow us to effectively market that capacity.”
However, the MGTO boss noted that the addition of more hotel rooms remained a vital component in the government’s goal of increasing the length of stay of visitors. According to statistics released last month by the Statistics and Census Service, the average length of stay for visitors to Macau increased to 1.4 days in 3Q18, up from 1.3 days.
“The number of rooms does impact the possibility of people staying longer in Macau – the more rooms the higher the possibility there is for people to be enticed to stay longer,” Senna Fernandes said. “Obviously there is a need to continue to have more hotel rooms.
“Having such a high occupancy rate at this point in time, only about 53% of our visitors actually stay overnight so in order to increase the ratio of overnight visitors we definitely need to have more rooms.”
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