Macau, China, July 24, 2025 (Lusa) - Macau welcomed 19.2 million visitors in the first half of 2025, 14.9% more than in the same period of 2024 and the second highest figure ever for the start of a year, it was announced on Thursday.
According to official data, the number of tourists visiting Macau was only surpassed between January and June 2019 - before the Covid-19 pandemic - when it recorded almost 20.3 million visitors.
However, according to the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC), more than 58% of visitors (11.2 million) arrived on organised tours and spent less than one day in the city.
In 2024, the Central Government announced a series of measures to support Macau, such as increasing the tax exemption limit for personal goods purchased by visitors from China.
At the same time, the Chinese authorities extended the list of places with ‘individual visas’ to visit Hong Kong and Macau to 10 more cities in China.
In addition, since 1 January, residents of the neighbouring city of Zhuhai have been able to visit Macau once a week and stay for up to seven days.
As a result, the overwhelming majority (90.6%) of tourists arriving in Macau in the first half of the year came from mainland China or Hong Kong, while only 1.34 million were international visitors.
On 17 January, the director of the Chinese semi-autonomous region's Tourism Services, Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, said she expected Macau to receive between 38 and 39 million visitors this year.
In August, she set a target of more than three million international visitors by 2025.
The territory's authorities announced at the end of June that citizens of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman would be exempt from visa requirements to enter Macau from 16 July.
The measure comes at a time when the Macau government wants to attract more international visitors and after the territory's authorities and tour operators visited Saudi Arabia and Dubai in February to promote cooperation.
Despite the increase in the number of tourists, average spending per visitor in the Chinese region of Macau, excluding casinos, fell 13.2% in the first quarter of the year, compared with the same period in 2024.
In early May, the region's Statistics and Census Service pointed to “changes in visitor consumption patterns” as one of the main reasons for Macau's 1.3% economic decline between January and March.
It was the first time that the territory's Gross Domestic Product had shrunk year-on-year since the end of 2022, when the region began lifting restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Macau received 34.9 million visitors last year, 23.8% more than the previous year, but still far from the record 39.4 million set in 2019, before the pandemic.
VQ/AYLS // AYLS
Lusa
