Macau recorded only 212,311 visitor arrivals in March, down 93.7% year-on-year including a 99.4% decline in visitors via the Individual Visit Scheme (IVS) from mainland China.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent border restrictions have crushed visitation numbers to Macau, most notably since Guangdong Province imposed a 14-day mandatory quarantine on all arrivals from Macau, including mainland Chinese residents, on 27 March.
According to the Statistics and Census Bureau, while the total number of visitor arrivals in March dropped by 93.7% year-on-year, it actually increased by 35.8% compared with February.
Nevertheless, visitors from mainland China plummeted by 96.3% to 88,890 through March, with visitors from the nine Pearl River Delta cities in the Greater Bay Area down by 97.4% to around 19,700 people.
Visitors from Hong Kong dropped by 81.5% while those from other major countries showed decreases of more than 90%.
As ferry services between Macau and Hong Kong have been suspended since 24 February, Hong Kong visitors arriving via the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge soared by 131.3% in March, although Macau and Hong Kong have since introduced mandatory quarantine on arrival as of 25 March and the “Golden Bus” services also stopped operating on 7 April.
In March, visitor arrivals by air also declined by 97.1% compared with 2019.
Overnight visitors and same-day visitors declined by 92.0% and 95.2% respectively, but the average length of stay increased by 1.8 days to 3.0 days, while overnight visitors prolonged their stay by 2.5 days to 4.7 days.
For the first quarter of 2020, visitor arrivals fell 68.9% year-on-year to around 3.22 million, with over 70% of those being from mainland China.
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