As at the fourth quarter of last year, Macau saw 25 hotel projects under construction which could provide over 16,600 hotel rooms in the pipeline, the latest data released by the Bureau of Land, Public Works and Transport (DSSOPT) shows. The October to December period saw four more hotel projects under construction than the previous quarter, of which the addition of hotel room inventory mainly derives from the Cotai projects: there were nine hotel projects under construction in Cotai in the final quarter of last year, which could provide over 13,900 rooms – a number larger than the potential supply of 11,900 hotel rooms in the previous quarter. On the Macau Peninsula, there were 11 hotel projects under construction in the last quarter of 2014, with a potential supply of over 1,300 rooms; meanwhile, Taipa witnessed the ongoing construction of three hotel projects in the period that could bring about 1,000 rooms to the local market, and another hotel project in Coloane being built that could supply 200 rooms. Once these 16,600 hotel rooms are completed and online, it would represent an addition of nearly 60 per cent to the local inventory of hotel rooms, according to Business Daily calculations. By the end of last year, there were a total of 27,900 guest rooms in operation, of which as many as 66 per cent were 5-star hotels, data from the Statistics and Census Service reveals. For the whole of 2014, the occupancy rate of the hotels and guesthouses here was 86.5 per cent, up 3.4 percentage points when compared to the previous year. The number of guests that have stayed in these establishments has increased only slightly, by 0.4 per cent year-on-year, to 10.7 million. The latest data released by the public works department also notes that there were 28 hotel projects in the planning stage by the last quarter of 2014, which could deliver over 9,200 rooms in total. As many as 23 of these projects are on the Macau Peninsula, potentially supplying 3,100 hotel rooms. The largest number of hotel rooms in the pipeline is to be delivered by Cotai, where the government has seen two hotel projects in the planning stage come with a proposed 5,500 hotel rooms. In Coloane, on the other hand, two hotel projects are being planned in the period with a potential supply of over 460 rooms.
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