MACAO, Jan. 30 (Xinhua) -- Visitors on package tours to China's Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) totalled 8.63 million last year, up by 14.3 percent year-on-year, the SAR's statistics department said on Tuesday.

Information from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) indicated that package tour visitors reached 912,000 in December last year, up by 27.8 percent year-on-year, yet down by 0.4 percent month-to-month.

In December last year, package tour visitors from the Chinese mainland (746,000), South Korea (45,000) and China's Taiwan region (52,000) surged by 32.1 percent, 23.8 percent and 34.8 percent respectively year-on-year.

Meanwhile, outbound residents using services of travel agencies increased by 7.9 percent year-on-year to 131,000 in December last year. Among them, residents travelling on package tours grew by 7.5 percent to 56,000, with those going to the Chinese mainland (38,000) rising by 12.3 percent.

For the whole year of 2017, guests in hotels and guesthouses reached 13.15 million, up by 9.6 percent year-on-year. The average occupancy rate of hotels and guesthouses rose by 3.6 percentage points to 86.9 percent, with four-star hotels leading at 89.4 percent.