- Tourist spot brought in 1.38 million guests last year, a 95% recovery compared to pre-Covid levels
- Majority of travellers came from Southeast Asia, while European and American sightseers made up 50% of visitors in 2019
The number of visitors to Hong Kong’s Ngong Ping 360 has more than tripled in the last year. Photo: Shutterstock Hong Kong’s cable car attraction Ngong Ping 360 saw visitor numbers more than triple last year compared to pre-pandemic levels, with the majority of tourists coming from Southeast Asia.
Managing director Andy Lau Wai-ming said on Tuesday the attraction served 1.38 million guests in 2023 – a 255 per cent increase over 2022, and a 95 per cent recovery compared with pre-pandemic levels.
“We spent quite a bit of effort doing promotion work on social media, so we have seen good performance from the mainland,” he said.
Lau also said the “Crystal+” cabins introduced in December 2022, with fully transparent tempered glass bottoms and four walls, had a utilisation rate of 80 per cent during the summer holiday period. Throughout the Lunar New Year holiday, the utilisation rate was “over 100 per cent”.
“What we mean by that is, people had to queue for quite a while to get onto those cabins,” he said.
Given their popularity, the company planned to increase the number of Crystal+ cabins from the current seven to 20 by the end of the year – an upgrade that would cost as much as “tens of millions of dollars”, according to Lau.
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The bulk of the visitors to the attraction were from Asia, with levels having recovered 97 per cent compared with 2019.
Visitors from Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia exceeded pre-pandemic levels by 38 per cent, 22 per cent and 10 per cent respectively. Meanwhile, the number of mainland Chinese visitors increased by 29 per cent.
But the number of European and American visitors was only about 50 per cent of 2019 levels, which Lau blamed on flight capacity not having returned to normal.
As for visitor spending, Lau also noted a boost in consumption within the Ngong Ping Village.
He said that throughout the first eight days of the Lunar New Year holiday, there was an approximately 30 per cent increase in per capita spending compared with last year, and a 27 per cent increase compared with pre-pandemic levels.
Lau said there were no plans to adjust fares following a price hike in November last year.
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Regarding the inclusion of Xian and Qingdao on the list of eligible cities for the Individual Visit Scheme, Lau said he welcomed the move and that more promotional efforts would be made to target people from the two cities.
The government announced earlier this month that starting from March 6, visitors from the two cities in Shanxi and Shandong provinces will be able to visit Hong Kong on an individual basis.