The just-concluded National Day "Golden Week" did not shine particularly clinquant lights on Macao's tourist market as the city has been familar with bustling weekend travel heat since summer.

Macao welcomed more than 400,000 visitor arrivals during the "Golden Week" holiday period from Oct. 1 to 7. Although the number doubled the previous forecast, it still represented a decrease of some 25 percent from the same period last year, when it hosted 547,000 visitors during the week-long holiday.

Figures from the Macao Immigration Bureau suggested that some 270,000 of the arrivals came from China's mainland, and 170,000 of them were individual travel passport holders.

China's National Day holiday usually saw the highest influx of visitors from China's mainland to Macao. The mainland's implementation of relaxed individual travel permits to Hong Kong and Macao in July last year has made the two special administrative regions more sensitive of the mainland's long holidays than before, since both cities serve as hot tourist destinations for a massive influx of visitors during holidays.

Macao was shocked by floods of tourists from the mainland during the National Day holiday last year, which was the first major holiday after the mainland loosened individual travel restrictions to Hong Kong and Macao on a trial basis. The scheme has been extended 32 cities in China's mainland since then.

Macao's tourist market has been saturated at every weekend since summer travel season. The counting of visitor arrivals in the first eight months reached 10.8 million, which was close to the total number of 11 million recorded for the whole of last year.Macao recorded the highest monthly number of tourists in August, which went up to 1.6 million, 27 percent up over the correspondingperiod of last year.

Industry insiders forecast that the number of visitors would exceed 15 million by the year end, which would almost tap the maximum tourist handling capacity in the city of 27 square kilometers. In this sense, it is good to see that the flow of tourists is dispersed to normal days instead of holidays.

This was echoed by Macao's shop owners and hotel business people.

Owner of a Portuguese food restaurant surnamed Lee said that his business was only 10 percent up than normal days during the holiday period. But he was happy about that.

He said that his business was swift nearly all week round. He considered that individual travelers are more flexible to make their travel plans, who would rather avoid crowded holiday travels.

By Sept. 19, some 2.4 million individual travelers from China'smainland visited Macao this year, which has become the major source for Macao's tourist market growth.

Source: Xinhua