HK's visitor arrivals up 16 pct in October

Visitor arrivals to Hong Kong rose 16.4 percent year-on-year to 3,794,076 in October, and 16.2 percent to 34,217,497 in the first 10 months of 2011, the Tourism Board said on Tuesday.

In October, Chinese mainland visitor arrivals rose 24.9 percent to more than 2.5 million, due to the Golden Week holiday and trade shows.

In the first 10 months this year, there were 23 million mainland visitor arrivals, 23.7 percent higher than the figure for last year.

The short-haul market regions also recorded growth in October, with North Asia showing the best performance. In Japan, with its recovery in outbound travel, arrivals to Hong Kong increased 4.6 percent year-on-year to more than 100,000.

Arrivals from Thailand dropped 3.7 percent due to the flooding in the country.

For the long-haul markets, the slow recovery of the U.S. economy and the European debt crisis caused arrivals to fall 1.8 percent in October.

Source - xinhuanet