Macao anticipates 33 million tourist arrivals in 2024

Fueled by a tourism boom, China's Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) is seeing its tourist arrivals trend higher, anticipating over 33 million visitors to enter the city this year.

A total of 32.545 million visitors have arrived in Macao as Dec 7, this year.

Industry insiders attribute the region's growing popularity as an international tourist destination largely to diverse cultural and entertainment activities and improving infrastructure.

In recent years, Macao and its neighboring Chinese mainland province of Guangdong have stepped up efforts to make it more convenient for people to travel to the SAR.

In 2019, China's central authorities issued a general plan for building a Guangdong-Macao in-depth cooperation zone in Hengqin, which is located in the southern part of Zhuhai City in Guangdong, just across the Macao SAR.

The plan calls for efforts to build Hengqin into an international tourism island and Macao into a world center of tourism and leisure.

This year, the annual passenger flow of Hengqin Port exceeded 20 million for the first time. As of late November, the port handled 5.42 million Chinese mainland tourist trips, a year-on-year increase of 31.4 percent.

During major holidays, its daily passenger traffic broke historic record five times, with the highest reaching 103,500.

The central parity rate of the Chinese currency renminbi, or the yuan, strengthened 20 pips to 7.0108 against the U.S. dollar Monday, according to the China Foreign Exchange Trade System.

In China's spot foreign exchange market, the yuan is allowed to rise or fall by 2 percent from the central parity rate each trading day.

The central parity rate of the yuan against the U.S. dollar is based on a weighted average of prices offered by market makers before the opening of the interbank market each business day.