Tourists made more than 540,000 trips to Hong Kong in the first three days of the Lunar New Year holiday, but the figure represented only half the number of outgoing journeys by residents.
Statistics released by the Immigration Department on Tuesday showed 543,722 inbound trips were recorded between last Saturday and Monday, 87 per cent of which involved travellers from mainland China.
But the figure only represented 51 per cent of the 1.1 million outgoing trips by Hongkongers logged over the same period. A daily average of 355,000 residents left the city over the festive break so far, less than double the 181,000 inbound ones by tourists each day.
Hong Kong Tourism Association executive director Timothy Chui Ting-pong, meanwhile, said the number of tour groups coming over from the mainland for the holiday had already reached two-thirds of pre-Covid levels.
About 200 such tour groups had come to Hong Kong each day during the break, compared with the 300 per day back in 2017 and 2018,…
