A leading representative of Macau’s travel industry says it is unlikely tour groups from mainland China will return to pre-COVID frequencies due to a change in travel patterns.
According to the latest data from Macau’s Statistics and Census Service, there were 427,000 tour group visitors in the first six months of 2023 including 81,000 in June. However, during the same period in 2019, there were 4.9 million tour group visitors with 779,000 of those in June. The number of tour group visitors in the first half of this year was only 8.7% pre-COVID levels.
In an interview with local media, President of the Macau Travel Industry Council, Andy Wu, noted that “the number of daily visitors to Macau has remained relatively high recently, but most of them were free individual travelers.
“Tour groups to Macau are mainly mainland visitors, but most of them have changed their mode of travel to free individual travel or smaller groups, so it is expected that it will be difficult for the number of tour groups to return to the level of 2019 in the future,” he said.
Wu believes tour group frequency has now recovered to between 30% and 40% of pre-pandemic level and that there is still room for improvement, but said he only expects the industry to recover to between 70% and 80% at the most, with about 300 tour groups per day.
Macau recorded 2,209,662 visitor arrivals in June and 11,645,877 in the first six months of the year. However, tour group arrivals accounted for only 3.67% of the 1H23 total.
