MACAO, April 30 (Xinhua) -- Visitors on package tours to Macao rose by 39.6 percent year-on-year to 996,000 in March, the special administrative region (SAR)'s statistic service said here on Tuesday.

Information from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) indicated that package tour visitors from the Chinese mainland (803,000), China's Taiwan (61,000) and the Hong Kong SAR (20,000) surged by 47.5 percent, 11.3 percent and 47.1 percent respectively, and those from South Korea (63,000) went up by 31.1 percent.

In the first quarter of 2019, there were more than 2.4 million package tour visitors, an increase of 16.5 percent year-on-year.

As the Easter holiday began at the end of March in 2018 yet in the mid of April this year, outbound residents using services of travel agencies in March 2019 decreased by 10.1 percent year-on-year to 121,000.

There were 117 hotels and guesthouses operating at the end of March 2019, an increase of two year-on-year. Number of available guest rooms grew by 2.2 percent year-on-year to 39,000, with 5-star hotel rooms rising by 3.1 percent to 24,000 (62.9 percent of total).