Was Macau Golden week Successful?

The anniversary of China’s foundation is a festival that is held every year in Macau. Usually, there are a lot of Chinese tourists coming to Macau for a whole week to have fun at the festival and sometimes visit their relatives. The city always receives these visitors with open arms, offering them places to sleep and eat, but most importantly, it offers them places to gamble. One of the key attraction points of Macau are the casinos. Chinese mainlanders have no access to online or live casinos, so, therefore, they have to opt for anything else they can find honestly.

What is the Macau Golden Week?

The week that the festivities are held, is called the Macau Golden Week, where huge swarms of people take to the streets of the city and spend a lot of money every year, contributing to the city’s booming economy. However, this year the visitations turned down a notch. Not as many people crossed the border from Mainland China, which left a lot of experts and businessmen very anxious of what was to come in regards to the economy. The city was expecting visitors starting from September 28th and hoping to have an amazing week between 1 and 8 October. Despite the low visitations, Gaming revenue still remained sky high, giving many investors and casino owners a sigh of relief.

The average daily average still managed to increase compared to previous years. Macau was able to hit $162 million in daily revenues within the city. However, some skeptics believe that the level of progress is not the same as it was in the previous festivities, fearing that it is just a matter of time before the whole industry comes crashing down.

When should it start?

Regardless of the main customer base was tourists, it is still imperative that the golden week starts off with the right days. In this year’s case, October 1st was a Monday which unfortunately damaged the revenues a little bit because it for some reason made the tourists a little bit more reluctant to go out gambling. Plus it was the beginning of the festivities and everyone was thinking of actually getting there and finding a nice spot. Also, it is important to say that a lot of revenue was generated in the two days preceding the beginning of the Golden Week. Because the fact that September 29th and 30th were weekend days, the main influx of tourists started exactly then, therefore hindering the revenues of the golden week, because some tourists stayed only for a couple days and had already left before the main bulk of the revenues needed to start coming in.

Nevertheless, the results were still quite good for the year. The analysts have already calculated and said that there was a 5% growth compared to last year and despite the shortcomings of the arrivals. If the arrivals had been the same as last year than they would be looking at an at least 7% growth.