Total wipe-out; Macau with a 99.7% drop in visitors in April

The busy Labor Day week saw only 600 visitors compared to 436,000 last year

Macau visitors plummeted 99.7% in April due to the border restrictions implemented for precautionary measures against the COVID-19 virus.

Only 11,041 visitors were recorded arriving in Macau, with only 61 visitors entering the city by air travel while 328 visitors came from Hong Kong, and 210 came in from Taiwan.

Visitors from the mainland decreased by 99.6%.

The first four months of the year saw a 76.6% drop in visits compared to the same period last year, totalling to only 3.2 million visitors recorded.

According to the Statistics and Census Service, overnight visitors stayed longer from 2.2 to 21.1 days due to the quarantine measures in Macau and Guangdong.

Visitors from the mainland decreased by 99.6% in April compared to the same period last year with just 10,500 recorded visits, while visitors from other cities in the Greater Bay Area in Guangdong declined to just 4,410 – a 99.4% drop from last year’s records.

Earlier this month, Macau announced that they are easing border restrictions at the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge and Gongbei border gate by normalizing their operating hours. The state also launched a “health system code” which provided color coding for visitors coming in.

The Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau of Macau, hereafter called as DICJ, announced earlier this month that the gaming revenue fell by 96.8% year-on-year to MOP 754 million (US$ 95.1 million) in April. According to DICJ records, this is the lowest gross gaming revenue recorded since the opening of Sands Macau in May 2004, ending the monopoly system in Macau gaming.

The COVID-19 virus, which originated in Wuhan, China, has hit Macau gaming during its peak holiday season of the Lunar New Year. The Labor Day week, one of the busiest in the state, saw only 600 visitors in the first two days of the week compared to 437,000 visitors last year.

SiGMA goes digital with Asia Focus and Deep Tech