Tourist count surges 11.9% to 4.24m

Visitors from Mainland are still a big chunk.

According to a release, visitor arrivals to Hong Kong were up 11.9% year-on-year for October to reach 4.24 million, the Tourism Board said today.

Of these, more than 2.01 million were overnight arrivals, up 3.6% on last year.

Mainland China contributed over 1.28 million overnight arrivals. Meanwhile, same-day, in-town visitor arrivals rose 20.6% to more than 2.22 million.

There were more than 730,000 overnight visitors not from the Mainland. Many international markets showed satisfactory growth, including South Korea (+13.9%) and Thailand (+8.4%) for short-haul market regions, and Russia (+19.5%) and the UK (+6.3%) for long-haul regions.

Visitor arrivals in the first 10 months exceeded 39.62 million, up 15.8% year-on-year.

Of these, overnight arrivals accounted for some 19.42 million, a year-on-year increase of 6.5%. The remaining 20.19 million belonged to same-day, in-town arrivals.