MB July | Macau’s reputation among Hongkongers | 20 years of HKSAR

“Macau has a bad reputation among Hong Kongers?” travel writer Jamie James queried some years ago in the U.S. Atlantic magazine

James – who loves Macau – added that the feeling is based upon the “tacky place for gambling and various nefarious pursuits,” but that there’s no objective way to measure if it is so.

Thus, a recent example seems to reinforce that idea: a relief fund set up to support seven jailed police officers in Hong Kong rejected three donations totalling HK$2.5 million from three Macau donors. To avoid controversy, all three contributions were “respectfully turned down” to ward off unwanted media attention, fund founder Maria Tam Wai-chu said.

The Hong Kong press nevertheless identified Alvin Chau Cheok-wa, a Macau casino tycoon; Sun Entertainment Culture boss Charles Heung Wah-Keung and China Star Entertainment Group chairman; and Albert Yeung Sau-shing, Emperor Entertainment Group head, as the three ‘dangerous’ donors.

Pro-democracy lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting said on that occasion that the force should decline donations from donors with “questionable backgrounds,” including ex-convicts, warning that “accepting the donations would damage the force’s reputation and might constitute a conflict of interest.”

This is an extreme example. But two Hong Kong residents, with a profound knowledge of the Macau reality, listened to by Macau Business, confirm the idea: “Hong Kong people see Macau as a crowded city with mostly Mainland tourists and not many sightseeing places except for casinos and their related family tourists spots. As such, Macau may attract more Hong Kong travellers by building or repackaging historical sites, strengthening the leisure and jogging/walking paths, and consolidating the cruise ships/boats and even self-driving routes to Hengqin that can stimulate more Hong Kong visitors to explore different facets of Macau,” according to political commentator Sonny Lo.

“I know many people from Hong Kong who simply hate what Macau has become: they see it as an ‘entertainment park’ for Mainland tourists, and it is clearly too crowded for them. There is a longing for the old Macau, when Macau still had distinctive features of its own: some of them have been preserved, but they are becoming an ‘exotic resource’ for tourism to strive [for]…” adds Éric Sautedé.

Let’s now look at the numbers, a more rigorous way of getting there.

Apart from the changes in the way tourists are counted, since 2008 (see these pages) “Hong Kong remains the second largest visitor-source market for Macau, representing a 20 to 30 per cent market share of the total number of arrivals,” according to information supplied by Macau Government Tourism Office (MGTO) to Macau Business.

In addition, “in the last few years, the number of arrivals from Hong Kong to Macau were relatively stabilised to an average of close to 6.50 million visitors a year . . . The market has actually shifted from quantity to quality.”

The number and share of overnight stay visitors has been continually increasing for three consecutive years. From 2.78 million in 2014, the number of overnight stay visitors increased to 3.22 million in 2016, with the share in terms of total Hong Kong visitors expanding from 43.4 per cent in 2014 to 50.2 per cent in 2016, respectively. At the same time, the average length of stay of Hong Kong visitors increased from 1.4 days in 2014 to 1.7 days in 2016.

“On the other hand, with several new hotel projects having entered the market in Macau, in addition to the promotion of the tourism complexes carried out by tourism operators along with the adjustment in room rates in recent years, it attracted more Hong Kong residents to stay in the city’s hotels, mainly in top star-rated hotels. In fact, the number of hotel overnight guests from Hong Kong has seen a double-digit increase in the last couple of years,” says MGTO to Macau Business, who are putting “emphasis on embarking on a series of ‘visitation’ campaigns including various joint efforts with trade partners in Hong Kong and Macau such as the Macau on Sale programmes. At the same time, the MGTO-Hong Kong representative has launched ‘visibility’ campaigns to re-brand Macau as the convenient and diversified destination for short-haul break-away destination.”


‘Drastic plunge’

If we compare the number of Hong Kong visitors to Macau between 2007 and 2016 we see a loss of 1.5 million visitors. “The drastic plunge” in arrival figures from 2007 to 2008, as MGTO puts it, “was a matter of change of tourism statistics calculation.”

Mainland China Hong Kong
1999 1.65 4.23
2000 2.27 4.95
2001 3.01 5.2
2002 4.24 5.1
2003 5.74 4.62
2004 9.53 5.05
2005 10.46 5.61
2006 11.99 6.94
2007 14.87 8.18
2008 11.61 7.02
2009 10.99 6.73
2010 13.23 7.47
2011 16.16 7.58
2012 16.9 7.08
2013 18.63 6.77
2014 21.25 6.43
2015 20.41 6.53
2016 20.45 6.42

From 2008 onward, the Statistics and Census Service stopped including non-residents, namely workers and students, on visitor arrivals. “For this reason, 2008 visitor arrivals cannot be directly compared with those of 2007. Therefore, since a new tourism statistics calculation system was introduced, although in 2008 the number of arrivals from Hong Kong was lower than 2007 it cannot be interpreted as a decreasing trend of visitor arrivals from Hong Kong to Macau,” claims MGTO.

 

So different, so alike | 20 years of HKSAR