High hopes for National Day despite Hong Kong restaurants feeling pinch at Mid-Autumn Festival
Many eateries in Tsim Sha Tsui, city’s main tourist hotspot, seen half empty during lunch hours on Wednesday
Hong Kong restaurants are reporting a 10 per cent drop in receipts for the Mid-Autumn Festival compared with last year as residents head across the border, but a tourism sector veteran has expressed optimism the coming National Day holiday will bring in more mainland Chinese visitors.
Simon Wong Ka-wo, president of the Hong Kong Federation of Restaurants and Related Trades, said on Wednesday that catering businesses were reporting a 10 to 15 per cent decline during the Mid-Autumn Festival compared with last year, when the holiday period on the mainland stretched for eight days including the National Day “golden week” break.
“The main reason is that a large number of Hong Kong residents travel to the mainland, or spend the long weekend in other Chinese cities or Southeast Asia,” he told a radio show.
“There is a huge and obvious gap in the number of departures compared with the number of arrivals.”
Wednesday, the day after the Mid-Autumn Festival, is a public holiday in Hong Kong.
According to Immigration Department data, residents made more than 818,000 trips out of the city between Sunday and Tuesday, with 88 per cent of them via land border crossings to the mainland. Last year, Hongkongers made more than 1.8 million outbound trips over the eight-day period.
Visitors made 440,800 trips into Hong Kong between Sunday and Tuesday. Last year, they made 1.2 million trips into the city during the eight-day holiday.
