(2026 National Day fireworks over Victoria Harbour. Photo: Elson Li/SCMP)

October 1 Golden Week is here again, and with the overwhelming number of tourists walking the streets of Central speaking Putonghua over the past few days, one could actually confuse Hong Kong as being just another Chinese city. Some early data showed the massive influx of visitors on China's National Day, with many coming for the day just to see the fireworks.

We can update that chart to include Friday and Saturday.

Three days of data is not enough to draw any conclusions, but so far we are seeing an 8.4% increase in mainland visitors during Golden Week compared to last year.

One of the great concerns among politicians and citizens is a tourism race to the bottom, in which Hong Kong officials seem to be only concerned with the number of visitors to the city, while paying lip service to the notion that the government needs to develop its tourism profile to attract wealthier tourists who are willing to spend more. Even Hong Kong’s recently published Five-Year Plan calls for attracting “high value-added visitors” through better tourism products. To see what’s actually going on, let's start with the primary metric to determine tourism spending: visitor per capita spending. We'll concentrate on mainland spenders only, after all, mainlanders make up 78.3% of all visitors to Hong Kong this year.

To do this, let's take the data obtained from the Hong Kong Tourism Board, which is not too difficult to obtain from its website, but add a little twist: to see if tourists are actually buying more goods and services, we'll adjust the figures for inflation, and present the figures in terms of 2019 Hong Kong dollars.

A couple of things to notice. Mainland spending plunged after the pandemic, with day trippers on average spending less than half of what they spent before the pandemic, and overnight visitors spending 40% less than peak 2017-2018 levels.

Keep in mind the Hong Kong Tourism Board estimates per-capita spending by surveying visitors on their way out: at border control points, respondents fill in an electronic questionnaire where they fill in details about their itinerary, purpose of visit, expenditures, and other details. According to the Tourism Board, about 169,000 departing visitors were surveyed in 2024 using systematic random sampling.

Assuming the same sample size this year, and assuming the responses are truthful and the sampling is performed properly, based on a few quick calculations, such a large sample size would likely have a statistical margin of error within ±3% to obtain a 95% confidence interval for each quarter. Now looking at the charts on a year-to-year basis, per-capita spending in the first half of 2026 has increased by less than the 3% margin of error, so there aren't many obvious conclusions other than mainland visitor spending per-capita this year has been broadly flat. We'll need to wait for more data (in February 2027) to see whether per-capita spending for the full year has increased compared to 2025.

Proportion of daytrippers vs overnight stayers

So it appears the obvious solution for the government is to increase overnight visitors by attracting "high-value" tourists. Unfortunately the trend is heading in the opposite direction.

The proportion of overnight mainland visitors for 2026 is on pace to be the lowest since the pandemic, and likely to be even lower than 2019, the year of protests.

And now, the totals, please

With the available data, it's actually possible to get an estimate of the total number of dollars spent by mainland tourists over the years. To provide a fair comparison, once again we adjust the numbers for inflation and give the totals in terms of 2019 Hong Kong dollars.

So what you probably didn't know is that, after accounting for inflation, tourism spending from mainlanders is still less than half of what it was at its peak before the pandemic. And mainland tourism dollars this year are only expected to increase by an inflation-adjusted 4% compared to last year, which is poor given a predicted double-digit percentage increase in mainland tourists.

So what's the solution? Perhaps there is none, as the days of 2018 are not coming back for a long time, if ever, and there is no solution to double tourism dollars in a five-year span. While authorities might distract you and say there are all these new projects along the way (yacht hub! Skytopia!), a more realistic scenario is that they will probably conclude the only way to increase tourism dollars is to pack in even more mainland visitors, at the expense of Hongkongers’ quality of life.