Macau mulls more walks

In between gambling sessions, Macau’s tourism office hopes to encourage tourists to take a walk to soak up the destination’s history.
Last week, Macau Government Tourist Office director, Helena de Senna Fernandes, said MGTO would introduce new walking tours by late September.
They are being designed after consultations with local communities and officials hope they can also create a mechanism to check their popularity and actual use by tourists.

Helena de Senna Fernandes
Walks will be based on community districts that are called parishes and include those of Our Lady of Fatima Parish, S. Antonio Parish, Our Lady of Camel Parish and S. Francisco Xavier Parish.
They are not intended to be point-to-point walks, but circular rambles around parishes that have historical or cultural significance.
The objective is to assist tourists to explore Macau by themselves and show that the destination has considerably more appeal than just its casinos that dominate the economy and skyline.
Fernandes added that they want tourists to spend more time in one specific area.
“We hope that tourists can discover new attractions and to have a deeper travel experience… so that they can spend more time in a particular area and that will eventually drive the economy of the area,” Fernandes told the Macau Daily.
But it is all on paper right now and there are concerns that the project must first win community support to work in the long-run.
Macau has promoted walking tours for decades, but the challenge is to know exactly how many of the millions of tourists who visit the destination annually actually bother to leave a casino and explore the historical quarter.
“As we have previously indicated, if we only look at the number of leaflets we have handed out for walks, it is not a small number. We have printed over a million leaflets and we are printing more. But the major problem is that we cannot count how many people have actually walked [on the routes] and for how long. This is a bit difficult for us to count.”
Starting in June, MGTO will introduce an award programme, such as stamp collection, to gather statistics and other data on walks use.

Sourced: ttrweekly