Hotels in Macau’s casino resorts posted a 91.6 percent occupancy rate despite the surge of hotel room supply in the Asia’s premier gaming hub.
Latest data from the Macau Government Tourist Office (MGTO) show that hotel occupancy in the former Portuguese enclave notched a 6 percent year-on-year increase. The city’s hotel occupancy rate was 3.5 percent higher compared to November’s data.
A local, three-star hotel posted a 96.5 occupancy rate – the highest of all hotels in Macau. According to the data, it is a 6.3 percent increase compared to 90.2 per cent registered in the same month last year.
However, 5-star hotels saw the greatest annual growth, up 7.4 percentage points to 90.1 per cent, compared to 82.7 per cent in November last year.
For 4-star hotels, the occupancy rate was 93 per cent, posting an increase of 5.2 percentage points year-on-year.
Brokerage Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd., however, pointed out that Macau casino operators will need more hotel capacity in order to overcome “bottlenecks” caused by spiking demand at weekends and public holidays.
“While in 2012-2014, the weekday business was dominated by junket business with largely day-tripper mass mixed in… weekend business was all the people coming on vacation (mass players), premium mass and VIP players,” Sanford Bernstein analysts Vitaly Umansky, Zhen Gong and Yang Xie said in their Friday document. “Currently, almost all the mass [market] recovery has come from play on weekends and holidays. Operators will need more hotel capacity and at some point in the future [more] gaming capacity.”
Meanwhile, the average hotel room price in November dropped by 9.8 per cent to MOP1,203 (US$150) per night this month compared to the MOP1,333 (US$166.66) rate of the same period. On a monthly comparison, hotel room prices decreased by 9.9 per cent.
The average cost of staying one night in a local 3-star hotel was slashed by 18.2 per cent year-on-year to MOP788, compared to MOP963 in November 2015.
Room prices of five-star and four-star hotels also dropped by 9.5 per cent and 9.2 per cent to MOP1,487 and MOP782 respectively, compared to MOP1,644 and MOP861 in the same period last year.
The MGTO data, also based on information provided by the Macau Hotel Association, includes 42 hotels in the city in the 3-star to 5-star range.
The average hotel occupancy rate for the first eleven months of the year slightly increased by 1.6 percentage points against last year’s data. In January to November period, five-star hotels eked out a 1.3 percent increase, year-on-year.
Increases in the cumulative occupancy rate also appeared in both 4-star and 3-star hotels, up 2.3 percentage points and 2.8 percentage points year-on-year, to 85.6 per cent and 89.8 per cent, respectively.
On the other hand, the general price of local hotel rooms dropped 13.1 per cent year-on-year for the first eleven months of 2016.
