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Hong Kong’s cable car on Lantau Island received 20.6 per cent fewer visitors in 2019, as protests hammered tourism sector
- The opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge in late 2018 boosted its visitor numbers in the first half of 2019 by more than 10 per cent
- But visitor numbers dropped in the second half of 2019 and a significant decline was recorded in the fourth quarter amid social unrest
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Hong Kong’s iconic cable car on Lantau Island received 1.45 million guests in 2019, down 20.6 per cent year on year, as the months-long anti-government protests hammered the tourism sector.
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Operators of the Ngong Ping 360 said the opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge in late 2018 boosted its visitor numbers in the first half of last year by more than 10 per cent.
“However, visitor numbers dropped in the second half of the year and a significant decline was recorded in the fourth quarter,” its managing director Andy Lau said on Friday.
Last summer, a civil unrest, sparked by the now-withdrawn extradition bill, morphed into a wider movement against the government and police, often ending in violent clashes between demonstrators and officers. The uprising adversely affected the city’s tourism sector.
In 2019, Hong Kong’s tourist arrival figures slumped 14.2 per cent year on year to 55.9 million, dragged down by a 14.2 per cent decline in the arrivals of mainland Chinese who accounted for about 80 per cent of all visitors.
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The average number of daily visitors to the cable car attraction dropped about 17.5 per cent from the previous year to 4,445 in 2019.
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