Underpinning private consumption spending are visitor arrivals, which continue to boom. Arrivals in the territory were up by 13.9% year on year in March, to 3.2m, boosted by a 21.6% increase in arrivals from China to just over 303,000 over the course of the mainland's three-day Labour Day holiday. Mainland China accounted for 63% of visitors to Hong Kong in March, with a further 7% hailing from Taiwan and Macau, indicating that attempts to diversify the tourism sector's reliance on Greater China have not yet yielded results.

Hong Kong achieved a 91% hotel-occupancy rate in March, with the average daily room rate up by 18.7% year on year to HK$1,404 (US$180). The number of hotels rooms, at 60,730 in March, is not much higher than the figure of 59,627 at end-2009, but approved projects show an increase to 63,494 by end-2011 and 68,189 by end-2012, providing room for further tourism growth.

The small cruise-ship segment of the market is expanding, with a 4.5% year-on-year increase in cruise-passenger throughput in the first quarter, to 411,061. Another small but important segment of the market is meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions, which saw visitor arrivals rise by 5.1% year on year in the first quarter of 2011, to 296,156. Unsurprisingly, 40.9% (120,963) of these visitors were mainland-Chinese, up by 13.5% year on year.