Despite recording a decline of 6.7% in Mainland arrivals to 42.8 million in 2016, the Mainland remained our largest visitor source market accounting for around 76% of our total arrivals. The “one trip per week” measure for Shenzhen residents implemented since April 2015 that took into account the receiving capacity of individual districts in Hong Kong and the development direction of attracting more overnight visitors have expectedly resulted in a drop of 8.7% of same-day Mainland arrivals. Meanwhile, Mainland overnight arrivals decreased by 3.5%.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting that there were some signs of recovery of our arrivals in certain markets in 2016. For instance, among non-Mainland arrivals, the number of visitors from the short-haul markets registered an increase of 3.4% over 2015 to 9.2 million, underpinned by the strong growth in the overnight arrivals by 7.6%. Likewise, arrivals from the long-haul markets increased by 2.3% to 4.7 million. The high value-added segments, including the arrivals of overnight visitors for Meeting, Incentive, Convention and Exhibition (“MICE”) and cruise passenger throughput also recorded a year-on-year increase of 10% and 50% respectively.
Hong Kong’s top ten visitor source markets in 2016 in the order of arrival numbers were the Mainland, Taiwan, Korea, the United States, Japan, Macao, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Australia. Altogether they accounted for 92% of the total visitor arrivals.
For more information about tourism research statistics, please visit the website of
Hong Kong Tourism Board.
Previous Tourism Performance
2019
2018
2017
2015
