More than 25 million tourists visited Macau in first ten months of 2008

Around 25.1 million visitors entered Macau in the first ten months of the year, which was a rise of 14.5 % on the same period of 2007 when 21.9 million people visited the territory, MacauNews reported Friday.

The director of the Macau Tourism Office, João Manuel Costa Antunes said Thursday that in 2008 a total of around 30 million tourists were expected to visit Macau, or 3 million more than in 2007.

According to MacauNews, which cited the region’s Statistics and Census Bureau, the greatest number of tourists was from Mainland China, accounting for 14.6 million people, a rise of 21.9 % against the same period of 2007 when 12 million Chinese tourists visited the region.

According to Macau’s official figures in the first ten months of the year Macau welcomed 6.79 million tourists from Hong Kong, 1.1 million tourists from Taiwan and 1.2 million from Southeast Asia. Most of the tourists – 15.7 million – arrived in Macau through the land border and 7.9 % arrived by sea, mainly from Hong Kong.

In October alone 2.6 million tourists traveled to Macau, a rise of 8 against the same month of 2007. 1.5 million of these were from China, which represented a fall of 25.9 against October 2007.