Macau’s casino gambling industry will be pleased to know that hotels and guest houses are also doing their bit to boost the gaming industry ever further. The number guests bedding down for the night on the enclave increased by 5% year-on-year compared with the first three months of last year. The figure was just short of 4 million at 3.99million for the first six months of the year.
Official data also showed that the average occupancy rate for accommodation on the enclave was up 3.3% to 82%. By the end of June, Macau had a total of 21,676 rooms available to anyone who wanted them and 62.6% of them were five-star. This will be further boosted by the new Sands China project on the Cotai strip that will include 6,000 rooms after dealing was struck with Hilton and Intercontinental Hotels.
Package tours are likely to be accounting for much of the higher occupancy rates after it was revealed that arrivals on this type of excursion were up by 20.9% year on year for the month of June. According to the Statistics and Census Service, the number of tours hit 591,000 in the sixth month of the year with two countries in particular seeing a large spike in the number visiting Macau.
Tourists from Mainland China swelled by 29% to 435,000 with visitors from Taiwan up by a huge 50.1% to 33,000 for the period mentioned. Figures for the first six months of the year saw package tours increase by 2% year-on-year to 3.13 million. It goes to show why the gaming industry continues to generate such good revenue figures as the months go by. It will be interesting to see if they can maintain such a high level in 2012.
