Information from the Statistics and Census Service show visitor arrivals in package tours jumping 20.3% year-on-year to 572,157 in April. Around three-quarters of these were from the Chinese mainland, up 18% over the previous April. Koreans and Japanese were up strongly, too. Meanwhile, overnight guests staying in formal accommodation (i.e. not in saunas) totalled 664,286, up 15% over the previous April. More than half came from the Chinese mainland, while 23% were from Hong Kong. Four-star hotels had the highest occupancy rate (87%), pipping the five-stars at 81%, while the average length of stay was 1.4 nights.

Package tour demand has been strong indeed, but don’t be fooled by the numbers pouring out of the mainland. Package tourists from China are not the high value-added visitors that everyone salivates over from Korea or Japan. They are very often day-trippers coming in with their rucksacks and baseball caps provided by CITS, and they have very small bankrolls. You don’t see them at Wynn; they mostly go to the SJM casinos and the Venetian, where they take tours of the Grand Canal Shoppes and pool their savings to bet on the HK$100 baccarat or sic bo tables. That said, Macau needs more of them: there is still plenty of space out on Cotai to grow into. And the hotel occupancy numbers are welcome, too. Those are indeed higher-value visitors, even if the majority of them are comped. In fact, it’s becoming obvious that there aren’t enough hotel rooms to go around at the moment for the higher-end players. Encore and Four Seasons, for instance, are hard places to get a booking. Bring on Galaxy Macau, with Okura and Banyan Tree, and Lot 5&6, with Sheraton, Shangri-la and Traders, we say.

Used with permission & copyright to IntelMacau