Lunar New Year turnout massive disappointment for Macau
No one was really expecting the Lunar New Year to rake in any tourists to Macau, however the actual turnout still proved to be disappointing as the city was hoping to welcome about 100,000 visitors but failed to do so by a large gap. The coronavirus is still on the loose and Macau has definitely been seeing its negative effects as figures keep dropping the more time goes by.
The Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) had announced its hopes to welcome approximately 20,000 tourists on a daily basis during the Lunar New Year period. However that has not been the case as the total recorded number of visitors has been just under 63,000 since the 11th of February, which marked the start of the yearly holiday. This number is much lower than what everyone expected, seeing as on the 11th and 12th of February, less than 10,000 entered the city per day. The highest daily number recorded so far has been on Monday with 17,357 tourists. This was less than half the amount of visitors recorded on that exact day in 2020.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of these tourists arrived from the country’s mainland, totalling to about 57,000 tourists entering Macau from mainland China via land transport systems. It was said that less than 5,000 of them arrived through air transport.
The city’s international airport stated that it expected flights into the city to increase during what’s left in the month of February, meaning that the airport might see about 1,100+ commercial flights by next month. This figure means that around 40 flights a day will be recorded, much higher than January’s numbers of an average of 28 flights per day and 870 in total.
The airport can predict such numbers thanks to all the updates that airlines are giving concerning their active flights for the month of February. These airlines include Air China, China Eastern Airlines, Air Macau, Spring Airlines, Shanghai Airlines and Xiamen Airlines. Among the flights being sent out to Macau are about 15 mainland Chinese cities.