Macau welcomes almost 2 million visitor arrivals in March, up 23% on February

The number of visitor arrivals to Macau in March grew by 271.4% year-on-year to 1,956,867, the Statistics and Census Service said Monday.

The March figures was also 22.8% higher than February and took the total number of arrivals through the first three months of 2023 to 4,948,358, up 163.7% year-on-year.

There were 1,242,358 visitors from mainland China in March, a year-on-year increase of 164.9%, of which 720,052 arrived under the Individual Visit Scheme. Visitors from the nine Pearl River Delta cities in the Greater Bay Area increased by 79.0% year-on-year to 563,083, with 27.9% of those coming from Zhuhai (157,032) and 21.0% from Guangzhou (118,361).

Visitor arrivals from Hong Kong soared by 1,077% year-on-year to 622,304 and from Taiwan by 447.5% to 26,645.

The total March figure included 979,152 overnight visitors and 977,715 same-day visitors, with the average length of stay holding steady at 1.2 days.

The huge increase in arrivals comes with Macau having been heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic throughout last year, with around 526,000 arrivals in March 2022 of which nearly 90% were from mainland. The total number of visitors in 1Q22 was 1.87 million.