Tourists visit Macao, south China, Jan. 11, 2018. The total visitor arrivals to Macao topped 32.6 million in 2017, up 5.4 percent from the year before, the special administrative region (SAR)'s tourism office said here during its annual press conference on Wednesday.(Xinhua/Cheong Kam Ka)

MACAO, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- The total visitor arrivals to Macao topped 32.6 million in 2017, up 5.4 percent from the year before, the special administrative region (SAR)'s tourism office said here during its annual press conference on Wednesday.

Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) said the preliminary data in 2017 revealed that several tourism figures registered year-on-year growth last year, including the total and international visitor arrivals, the sum of visitors from the Greater China region as well as that of overnight-stay visitors.

Total visitor arrivals grew by 5.4 percent to exceed 32.6 million in 2017, while over 29.4 million visitors came from the Greater China markets, a rise of 5.3 percent. International visitor arrivals surged by 6.2 percent to a new record of more than 3.1 million, accounting for 9.8 percent of total visitor arrivals.

MGTO added that the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong SAR and China's Taiwan stood as Macao's top three visitor source markets. The city welcomed over 20 million visitors from the Chinese mainland last year, up by 8.5 percent, with 41 percent of the visitors from the province of Guangdong.

Among international markets, South Korea continued to rank the first, contributing over 870,000 visitors to Macao with robust growth of 32 percent in 2017. Japanese visitor arrivals climbed up by 9.4 percent, whereas the figures of visitors from the Philippines and Indonesia rose by 7 percent and 8 percent respectively.

The preliminary data also show that overnight-stay visitor arrivals exceeded same-day visitor arrivals last year, which had lasted for 10 consecutive months since last March. The total overnight-stay visitors rose by 9.9 percent to more than 17.2 million, accounting for 52.9 percent of the total visitor arrivals with a year-on-year increase of 2.2 percentage points.

The average length of stay stood at 2.1 days for overnight-stay visitors and 1.2 days for all visitors.