Business travel in Macau largely unscathed

Last Wednesday, Typhoon Hato struck Macau, causing disruptions to the leisure market, but corporate traffic has been mostly spared as August is a generally low season for the business segment.

Air Cruise’s executive director, Eric Chang, said: “I’ve only had one overseas event organiser who postponed a site inspection. Nearly 90 per cent of inbound traffic is made up of Mainland Chinese, so the international market takes up only a small ratio. Moreover, August is usually quiet for us so there wasn’t any big impact.”


Not much disruption to business events despite bad weather in Macau

Olinto Oliveira of MCI’s Macau office agreed that August is traditionally a slower month for business groups, hence the effects weren’t too bad. He pointed out that the resorts would be equipped for this sort of situation regardless.

This sentiment was echoed by Daniella Tonetto, general manager sales and marketing of the Sheraton Grand Macao Hotel and St. Regis Macao. While the hotels had a few groups, they continued with their meetings as per normal.

“For groups (whose plans were) disrupted due to transportation, we accommodated them for the additional nights required. We did have two smaller events that were postponed to later this year, as they had not commenced their travel to Macau yet,” Tonetto shared.

She added: “As August is traditionally a peak season for leisure travellers due to the school holidays, the impact to the group segment was not that high.”

For smallWorld Experience, the company had no groups in town, but they did have a few teambuilding events in Hong Kong during the week of the typhoon.

Its CEO, Bruno Simões, said: “The corporate world is very sensitive to this type of news and we are receiving emails from clients confirmed for the next few months asking if their events will be affected. We had one event in Hong Kong on the typhoon day but obviously everything was cancelled. But an event on the following day was still conducted in Hong Kong, with resources coming from Macau.”

“For this week, there are a couple of inspections. While one is still going ahead, the other was cancelled due to the loss of power at a Cotai property,” he concluded.

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