Macau's number of visitor arrivals surged by 97.7 percent month-to-month to 449,085 last month, the Statistics and Census Bureau (DSEC) said today.

A DSEC statement attributed the strong growth to the resumption of the issuing of mainlanders' Macau travel permits in late September.

However, the statement pointed out that the figure still represented a decline of 83.8 percent year-on-year. Same-day visitors and overnight visitors totalled 289,474 and 159,611 respectively. On account of an increase of 14.2 percentage points in the proportion of same-day visitors (64.5 percent), visitors' average length of stay went down by 0.3 day year-on-year to 1.0 day in September. The duration for same-day visitors (0.1 day) shortened by 0.1 day year-on-year, while that for overnight visitors (2.7 days) rose by 0.3 day.

The number of mainland visitors fell by 78.6 percent year-on-year to 412,451; those travelling under the Individual Visit Scheme totalled 90,100, and 91.9 percent of them came from Guangdong province.

Visitors from the nine Pearl River Delta cities in the Greater Bay Area (GBA) reached 250,996, of whom 134,798 came from the adjacent city of Zhuhai. Meanwhile, there were 33,115 visitors from Hong Kong and 3,515 from Taiwan.

Visitor arrivals by land totalled 439,446 in September, 364,288 (82.9 percent) of whom arrived via the Barrier Gate checkpoint. There were 5,260 visitor arrivals by sea as passenger ferry services between Macau and Shekou in Shenzhen were resumed in September. A total of 4,379 visitors arrived by air.

In the first nine months, the number of visitor arrivals declined by 86.7 percent year-on-year to 4,019,104. Same-day visitors (2,219,383) and overnight visitors (1,799,721) declined by 86.1 percent and 87.4 percent respectively year-on-year. Visitors from the mainland (3,019,362), Hong Kong (715,292) and Taiwan (89,276) recorded year-on-year decreases of more than 80 percent, the statement pointed out.