The director of Macau Tourist Services affirms that the tourist recovery, after the pandemic, “is advancing at a good pace” and wants greater tourist flows with Portugal.
The director of Macau Tourism Services says they want to expand and diversify tourists and, as the Portuguese are among those who value it the most, the Portuguese travel agents congress in 2025 in the region creates opportunities.
“We believe that the conditions exist to prepare another excellent APAVT congress in Macau.which allows Portuguese tour operators to update themselves on the new dynamism experienced in our destination,” said María Helena de Senna Fernandes in Huelva, Spain, where the 49th APAVT Congress ends this Saturday.
The 50th Congress of Travel and Tourism Agencies (APAVT) will return to Macau from December 2 to 4, 2025, for the sixth time.
“Since the last edition we organized in 2017, there have been many new developments. Macau was designated a Creative City of Gastronomy by UNESCO, several historic areas are being revitalized and transformed into community tourist attractions, new resorts and hotels have opened and there is, above all, a strong focus on strengthening ‘tourism+conventions and exhibitions’. offers, ‘tourism+culture, ‘tourism+gastronomy’, ‘tourism+events’, among others, along with an increase in the possibilities of multi-destination tourism in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area,” he stated.
The person in charge said that the Macau’s tourism recovery, after the pandemic, “is advancing at a good pace”and the region received almost 26 million visitors through September, approximately 86% of 2019 figures.
“In addition to recovering numbers, our focus is on expanding and diversifying the sources of visitors, especially international ones. Portugal continues to be among the markets that we value most, due to the historical friendly relations that unite us, and the development position assumed by Macau as ‘a center, a platform’, that is, a global center of tourism and leisure, and a platform for services for economic and commercial cooperation between China and Portuguese-speaking countries,” he explained.
María Helena Fernandes recalled that the collaboration with the APAVT, since the end of the pandemic, allowed initiatives to be carried out, especially with tour operators, “Resume the dynamism of visitor flows between Portugal and Macau.“, but also address the Spanish and European market.
The president of APAVT, Pedro Costa Ferreira, listed, in this sense, the support they have given to Macau with their presence at Fitur – one of the largest tourism fairs held in Madrid -, after having brought there in 2023 “a group important of Spanish Entrepreneurs”, as well as the programming, for 2025, of two annual meetings of the European confederation of travel agencies (ECTAA – European Travel Agents’ and Tour Operators’ Associations), which will choose Macao as a ‘preferred destination’.
“In the year in which, at seventy-five years of age, we celebrated our fiftieth congress, we decided to do so in a city that is not only a city, but also a fabulous tourist destination, with a team that not only represents a tourist destination , it is also a group of close friends (…)”, stated Pedro Costa Ferreira, promising that on the part of the APAVT “it will be the best congress of all time.”
On December 1, 2023, during the 48th APAVT Congress in Porto, the association announced that Macau had been chosen as the preferred international destination for 2024.
Choosing the ‘preferred destination’ is an annual APAVT project that aims to contribute to boosting tourist flows towards a certain destination, through work with the association and its members, especially in terms of tourism promotion.
Previously, on June 30, 2023, the director of Macau Tourism Services said she expected “almost a thousand representatives” of the tourism industry to travel from Portugal to the APAVT congress in Macau, while Pedro Costa Ferreira predicted that “at least 750,800 people”.
Source: Observadora
