MACAO, Jan. 13 (Xinhua) -- The average occupancy rate of Macao's hotel sector dropped by 0.8 percentage point year-on-year to 78.4 percent in November 2009, with four-star hotels leading at88.2 percent, according to the figures released on Wednesday by Macao's Statistics and Census Service (DSEC).

    At the end of November 2009, the total number of available guest rooms in local hotel sector increased by 12.9 percent year-on-year to 19,216 rooms, the DSEC figures indicated.

    A total of 630,662 guests checked into hotels and guest-houses in November 2009, an increase of 11.1 percent over the previous year, with the majority coming from the Chinese mainland (51.9 percent) and Hong Kong (20.4 percent).

    The average length of stay of hotel guests increased by 0.08 night to 1.5 nights, and the cumulative number of hotel guests increased by 1.6 percent in the first 11 months of 2009 to 6.02 million.

    As for the first 11 months of 2009, visitor-guests of hotels accounted for 61.3 percent of the total number of tourists, up from 58 percent in the corresponding period of 2008, according to the DSEC.