China outbound travel strong in Golden Week, Macau not key beneficiary

Monday 5th of October 2015

Outbound travel from China remained strong during the key Golden Week holiday, despite the depreciation of the yuan, but Macau doesn’t appear to have been a major beneficiary, at least in terms of gambling revenue.

According to the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Bangkok were the top three outbound tourism destinations, while long-haul destinations in Europe and America have also increased significantly.

As the Golden Week holiday coincided with the mid-Autumn festival this year, Chinese workers taking an extra three days off work would have had a 12-day holiday, encouraging longer haul travel.

In Macau, total visitor arrivals on October 1, the official start of the holiday, were up 7.6 percent year-on-year, to 147,376, with those coming from mainland China rising 18.3 percent to 123,707, making up 84 percent of the total. Unfortunately, bad weather due to Typhoon Mujigae meant that visitor numbers actually declined year-on-year on Sunday, reversing the trend.

Overall visitation for the period October 1 to October 4 inclusive increased by 1.9 percent year-on-year to 632,008 arrivals, while China visitation increased by 7.8 percent.

In Macau, Wells Fargo says preliminary checks show performance was in line, putting October on track for a decline of between 27 percent to 31 percent year on year.

Average daily revenue for last week was up 48 percent on that seen in September, but was still down 33 percent compared with the same month last year.

ADR was MOP 800 million to MOP 900 million last week, vs. September's ADR of MOP 571 million.

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