Visitors wear face masks as they sit inside the Venetian casino hotel resort in Macao on Jan 22, 2020. (ANTHONY WALLACE / AFP)

MACAO - A total of 6.62 million guests checked into Macao's hotels and guesthouses in 2021, up 71 percent year-on-year, the special administrative region's statistics department said on Thursday.

The latest report from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) showed that the average occupancy rate of guest rooms for 2021 went up by 21.4 percentage points from a year earlier to 50 percent.

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For the whole year of 2021, the number of local tour visitors in Macao soared by 112.2 percent year-on-year to 40,000

Guests from the mainland leaped by 94.9 percent year-on-year to 5.38 million, about 81.2 percent of the total, showed the report. The average length of stay of guests extended by 0.1 nights year on year to 1.8 nights.

For the whole year of 2021, the number of local tour visitors soared by 112.2 percent year-on-year to 40,000. The Macao SAR government rolled out package tours for local residents at subsidized prices aiming to boost the local economy.

Outbound residents using services of travel agencies increased by 19.8 percent year-on-year to 150,000, and 98 percent of them visited the mainland, showed the report.

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In December 2021, a total of 118 hotels and guesthouses offered accommodation services to the public, a decrease of one year-on-year. The number of available guest rooms increased 10.3 percent to 39,000.

In December, a total of 650,000 guests checked into hotels and guesthouses in Macao, indicating an increase of 12.1 percent year-on-year, showed the report.