MACAO, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) -- The visitor arrivals to Macao in January this year dropped by 16.8 percent year-on-year to 2.85 million, due to the impact of COVID-19 epidemic, the special administrative region (SAR)'s statistic department said on Friday.

File photo: CGTN

The latest report from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) indicated that same-day visitors and overnight visitors decreased by 14.2 percent and 19.6 percent to 1.53 million and 1.32 million respectively.

The average stay length of visitors held steady year-on-year at 1.2 days. The overnight visitors extended their stay by 0.1 day to 2.3 days, whereas the duration for same-day visitors remained unchanged at 0.2 day.

The DSEC report added that the visitor arrivals from different origin markets registered a year-on-year decline in January. Visitors from the Chinese mainland went down by 14.9 percent to 2.13 million, and 57.2 percent of them were from Guangdong Province. Those traveling under the Individual Visit Scheme fell by 14.4 percent to 1.11 million.

Visitors from South Korea (43,129), Hong Kong SAR (476,032) and China's Taiwan region (70,382) declined by 56.6 percent, 10.8 percent and 19.0 percent respectively, and those from the United States (11,623), Australia (7,052), Canada (4,925) and Britain (3,132) recorded decreases of more than 20 percent.

The visitor arrivals by land fell by 14.1 percent year-on-year to 2.17 million in January, with those arriving through the Border Gate (1.61 million) and the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge (273,693) dropping by 11.7 percent and 38.3 percent respectively.

The visitor arrivals by air edged down by 0.6 percent year-on-year to 310,924, whereas those by sea fell by 36.9 percent to 368,220.