Travel China Planner

The first tourist bus between the two Chinese World Cultural Heritage destinations of Macau and Kaiping is now operating.

The historic centers of Macau and Diaolou and villages in Guangdong province are both inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List. The historic site have examples of both urban buildings and rural buildings and it is believed that these complementary resources will attract more foreign tourists who are interested in the two kinds of culture.

The bus will run twice a day with a journey time of about two hours.

At the Annual Marketing Meeting of the Macau Government Tourist Office, Joao Manuel Costa Antunes, the director of MGTO, stated that according to provisional data, in the first five months of 2009, the number of inbound tourists was 8.9 million: a decrease of 10% over the same period of last year.

The annual meeting was held at the Macau Tower Convention and Entertainment Center, with about 400 participants from 17 countries and regions.

Antunes pointed out at the meeting that the top ten visitor generating markets for the first five months were mainland China, Hong Kong SAR, Taiwan, China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and the USA. Of these there had been positive growth in numbers from Hong Kong SAR, Japan, and Thailand with increases of 0.3%, 8.7% and 14.9% respectively.

In the first quarter of 2009, the overall average spending per capita was MOP1,638, a drop of 5.3%.

Macao Daily News published headline news on February 11, stating that despite that slowdown of the global tourism industry, Macau was one of the few destinations in the world that achieved a good tourism performance in 2008.

Macau’s academics say that though the outlook for the global tourism industry is not so optimistic, there are still a lot of opportunities in Macau’s tourism market compared with those of the surrounding regions, since Macau benefits from its proximity to its source markets. The academics believe that even though the region’s tourismnumbers will decline in the year, the decrease will be relatively small.

According to a report recently released by the World Tourism Organization, the number of tourists for the global market increased by 2% last year, and only a few the destinations achieved increases over the year. The report shows that though there was a general decline in tourism in 2008, some regions, including Honduras, Nigaragua, Panama, Uruguay, South Korea, Macau, Indonesia, India, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey achieved very good results.

WTO estimates that the international tourism industry will still see a decrease of up to 2% in 2009 with the Americas and Europe mostly affected. However, WTO said that the Asia Pacific region would see an increase in tourism although the increase might be very small compared with the previous years.

Macau