In Macau, the Statistics And Census Service has announced that the number of tourists visiting in 2016 increased by 0.8% year-on-year to 30.95 million while the average occupancy rate for the city’s 107 hotels and guesthouses rose by almost two percentage points to reach 83.3%.

The figures also show that hotels in the former Portuguese enclave welcomed just over twelve million guests last year, which represented a year-on-year boost of 13.6% and was led by a 12.8% spike in vacationers from mainland China at 7.6 million, while the aggregate number of overnight stays swelled by 9.8% to 15.7 million and accounted for 50.7% of visitors to the city.

The Statistics And Census Service additionally revealed that last year saw Macau hotels welcome 304,000 holidaymakers from South Korea, which was an improvement of 34.3% when compared with 2015, while those from nearby Hong Kong grew by 17.8% to hit in excess of 1.7 million.

The research moreover found that four-star hotels had the highest occupancy rate in 2016 at 86.3%, which represented a rise of 5.7 percentage points year-on-year, followed by a 0.3% improvement from their more pricey five-star counterparts to 83.7%.

However, figures from the Macau Hotel Association show that the average length of stay last year decreased by 0.1 nights when compared with the previous twelve months to 1.4 while daily room rates fell by 12.7% to stand at $161. As such, the mean tariff for a five-star room declined by 11.6% to sit at $203, with three-star and four-star daily charges diminishing by 14.5% and 17.3% respectively.

Macau had some 36,300 hotel rooms at the end of December while 2016 saw the city’s tourist price index, which reflects the change in price for goods and services purchased by visitors, fall by 5.4% year-on-year largely due to lowered room prices.