The number of tourists visiting Macau was surpassed only once, between January and June 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, when the city recorded nearly 20.3 million visitors.
However, more than 58% of visitors (11.2 million) arrived on organized tours and spent less than a day in the city, according to the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC).
In 2024, the Central Government introduced a series of support measures for Macau, including an increase in the tax exemption limit on goods for personal use purchased by visitors from China.
Additionally, the Chinese authorities expanded the list of cities with “individual visas” for visiting Hong Kong and Macau to 10 more cities.
Since January 1, residents of the neighboring city of Zhuhai can visit Macau once a week and stay for up to seven days.
As a result, the vast majority (90.6%) of tourists arriving in Macau in the first half of the year were from mainland China or Hong Kong, with only 1.34 million being international visitors.
On January 17, the director of the Macau Government Tourism Office, Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, expressed hopes for Macau to receive between 38 and 39 million visitors this year.
In August, she set a target of attracting over three million international visitors by 2025.
The territory’s authorities announced at the end of June that citizens from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman would be exempt from visa requirements for entry into Macau as of July 16.
This measure comes as the Macau government seeks to attract more international visitors following visits by local authorities and tourism operators to Saudi Arabia and Dubai in February to promote cooperation.
Despite the increase in tourist numbers, the average spending of each visitor in Macau, excluding casinos, fell by 13.2% in the first quarter of the year compared to the same period in 2024.
In early May, the Statistics and Census Service of the region identified a “change in visitor spending patterns” as one of the main reasons for the 1.3% decline in Macau’s economy between January and March.
This was the first time the territory’s Gross Domestic Product shrank year-on-year since the end of 2022, when the region began lifting COVID-19 restrictions.
Last year, Macau received 34.9 million visitors, an increase of 23.8% from the previous year, but still far from the record of 39.4 million, set in 2019 before the pandemic.
