The average occupancy rate of Macao' s hotels dropped 1.8 percentage points year-on-year to 73.6 percent in April 2009, with four-star hotels leading at 83.6 percent, according to the figures released on Friday by the city's Statistics and Census Service (DSEC).

At the end of April 2009, there were 17,535 guest rooms available in local hotel sector, an increase of 8.3 percent from a year earlier, the DSEC said.

The figures also showed that a total of 577,228 guests checked into hotels and similar establishments in April, up by six percent year-on-year, with the majority of guests coming from the Chinese mainland (51.6 percent) and Hong Kong (23.2 percent),the DSEC figures indicated. Meanwhile, the average length of stay of hotel guests increased slightly by 0.01 night to 1.34 nights in the period.

As for the first four months of this year, total number of hotel guests reached 2.21 million, up 2.8 percent over the same period of last year, and visitor-guests of hotels accounted for 62 percent of the total number of tourists.

(Xinhua News Agency June 13, 2009)