The occupancy rate of Macau’s hotels and guesthouses grew by 33.5% year-on-year and 12.2% sequentially in September to 50.6%, aided by a brief respite from a small outbreak of COVID-19 in early August.
According to details from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC), the number of guests that checked into hotels and guesthouses in September leapt by 147.6% year-on-year to 531,000, with guests from mainland China more than doubling to 418,000 and local guests rising by 31.7% to 82,000. The average length of stay of guests increased by 0.2-nights year-on-year to 1.8 nights.
It could have been even more too but for another outbreak of COVID-19 towards the end of the month, which saw border restrictions introduced between Macau and Zhuhai from 25 September. Those restrictions were eventually lifted on 19 October.
For the first three quarters of 2021 combined, the average occupancy rate of guest rooms was 50.6%, up by 27.8 percentage points year-on-year.
A total of 5,040,000 guests were recorded, representing a 111.7% year-on-year-on-year-increase.
However, there were still no inbound package tour visitors in September. DSEC said there were nearly 8,000 outbound residents who used services of travel agencies with 96.2% of them visiting mainland China.