PATA urges Macau to ‘go after India’

Macau should place its bets on the Indian market, improve transport infrastructure and service quality, as well as create more offers for families, to become a global tourism and entertainment centre, head of the team of experts of the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA), Andrew Drysdale, suggested.
A group of seven PATA experts from the academic and consultancy fields of expertise ranging from aviation to destination management and branding were in Macau last week for a field visit.
They were commissioned by the Macau Government Tourist Office (MGTO) to establish a task force to provide expert opinions in determining future tourism policies and plans required to achieve the positioning of Macau as a World Centre of Tourism and Leisure.
The task force is expected to submit a full report to MGTO by early 2012, but Drysdale unveiled some preliminary findings in an interview with TDM last Friday.
The head of the PATA team urged Macau to play big on the Indian market. “If you had a compass and you drew a line around for five hours flying around Macau, keep your focus on that region. Go after the Indian market. You already have the mainland Chinese market and you are doing that very well,” he said.
The Indian market is “enormous” and it’s growing at around 20 to 18 percent per year, Drysdale stressed.
He also pointed out that Macau is a “unique” destination for India. “Remember that there is also a Portuguese element to India’s history as well. So you can play on that. I think you have a unique message to sell to them and to do that you’re going to need air links.

‘If you can open up direct flight services between Macau and India it will be very advantageous for you’:

Andrew Drysdale

“If you can open up direct flight services between Macau and India it will be very advantageous for you,” he remarked.
Macau registered a boom in Indian visitors last year. Around 169,000 Indian citizens have visited Macau in 2010, showing an increase of 60 percent. Only 5,000 tourists from India had visited Macau in 2002, but in 2009 the numbers reached 107,513.
Latest official statistics show a slight decrease in the number of Indian visitors, however. In the second quarter of this year, 61,837 tourists from India came to Macau, down 2.5 percent compared to the same period of 2010.
International Airport Company has been trying to lure companies to operate flights between the two sides since last year. They are offering special rebates to the airline that first launches connectivity between India and Macau, but there have been no results up to now.
Drysdale pointed out that Macau should target small companies that do not already have major operations in Hong Kong.

Non-satisfactory services

However, tourism authorities also have to focus on improving transport infrastructure, in particular immigration and taxi services.
“If you arrive in a major metropolitan city and you have to wait for 45 minutes or one hour at immigration, you won’t like it, but you probably will be there for five days or a week. So in the scheme of things, that’s not much.

‘Improve transport infrastructure and service quality, as well as create more offers for families’: Andrew Drysdale, head of the team of experts of the PATA (screen grab from TDM)

But “if you are coming into Macau for one night, a 45-minute wait in a line becomes much more an issue for you and that is a thing we should think about,” he cautioned.
Language barriers are also a challenge Macau needs to overcome. Drysdale suggested the SAR provide guidance for tourists at arrival points.
“Many airports and ports in the world now have people to do that. They simply stand by the taxi points and you tell them where you want to go and they will tell the taxi driver where to take you,” he explained.
Although Macau is “trying very hard” to improve the quality of service, “there are still some functional training things needed”. The expert also suggested the SAR focus on family tourism in order to surpass the bar of a one night stay, another challenge the MGTO has not yet managed to overcome.
“If people are coming only for a 24-hour stay they are unlikely to bring the family.
They will come in, go to the gaming room, might go to a restaurant or two and go back home. That’s one type of tourist, but I think you should be looking at a different kind of tourist. That first tourist will not be going away. They are still valuable to Macau,” he said.
He went on to say that to extend a tourist’s stay, one of the ways is to look for new kinds of tourists, like families and businesspeople.
“When businessmen or businesswomen come for a conference, they come partly because they want the intellectual exchange and the knowledge gain that comes from a conference. But they also come to have fun.
“Those people will probably go onto the casino floor and have a little gamble, but they’re going to want more than that,” he said.