April visitation drops off a cliff in Macau

Ongoing border restrictions put in place to help combat the coronavirus pandemic have reportedly helped to push Macau’s visitor numbers for last month down by 99.7% year-on-year to only 11,041.

According to a report from Inside Asian Gaming citing official information from the enclave’s Statistics and Census Service, this tally represented a 94.8% decline when compared with March and comes after the city of some 670,000 inhabitants recorded a 96.8% year-on-year drop off in April aggregated gross gaming revenues to approximately $94.42 million.

Detrimental precautions:

Inside Asian Gaming reported that March saw Beijing postpone its Individual Visit Scheme (IVS), which had allowed tourists from 49 mainland communities to venture into Macau and Hong Kong without having to be part of a tour group. The source detailed that this move along with a mandatory two-week quarantine period for anyone travelling into the former Portuguese possession have significantly hurt inbound tourism despite the fact that the area has not seen a recorded case of coronavirus since April 8.

Deepening decay:

Macau welcomed just over 3.43 million tourists in April of 2019, which had represented a swell of 15.9% year-on-year, with some 68% of these having arrived from mainland China. However, the most recent reckoning reportedly means that the city has experienced a 76.6% diminution through the first four months of the year to just 3.23 million.

Local lag:

Inside Asian Gaming reported that the number of holidaymakers entering Macau last month from mainland China had plummeted by 99.6% year-on-year to just 10,500 with the tally for those from the nation’s adjacent megalopolis standing some 99.4% lower at 4,410. To make matters worse and the source explained that just 61 foreign tourists had travelled into the city by air while Hong Kong arrivals had come it at a mere 210.