About macauholiday.com — Written by Someone Who Actually Lives Here

Nei hou. Olá. Welcome to macauholiday.com.

I arrived in Hong Kong in 1989. That was the last decade of British administration — the construction cranes above Kowloon, the Star Ferry crossing a harbour that hadn’t yet been narrowed by reclamation, the Cantonese pop that played from every open shopfront in Mong Kok. I lived there for eight years, through the handover in 1997, through the moment the flag changed at midnight and the city recalibrated itself.

Then I moved to Macau.

I have lived in Macau since. I watched the gaming concessions open to competition in 2002. I watched the Cotai Strip rise from reclaimed water between Taipa and Coloane — the Venetian, then the Parisian, then the towers that kept coming until the skyline stopped looking like anything I recognised from my early years here. I know what Senado Square looked like before the renovation, and what Rua da Felicidade looked like before the tourists found it, and which ferry company runs which route at what hour, and where the egg tarts are better than Lord Stow’s (nowhere, but I’ve checked).

This site exists because most English-language travel content about Macau and Hong Kong is written by people who visited once and produced a listicle. I have better material than that, and I have a camera that has been pointed at these streets for most of my adult life.

What macauholiday.com covers

The site is organised around six content pillars, starting with Macau and expanding into Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area as content develops:

Destinations — guides to Macau Peninsula, Taipa, Coloane, Cotai, and the individual neighbourhoods within each. Not a synopsis of Wikipedia; notes on what it actually feels like to spend a morning in a place and where the tourists aren’t.
Things To Do — tours, activities, itineraries. What to do if you have two days. What to do if you have never gambled and intend to keep it that way. What to do in Coloane on a Tuesday when every other visitor is in the Venetian.
Hotels — comparison guides for every tier, from the Ritz-Carlton’s all-suite Galaxy tower to the budget guesthouses near the Border Gate. Written without the inflated language that makes every property sound like the same property.
Food — the Macanese cuisine that developed over four centuries of Portuguese-Chinese overlap and is now on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Where to find it, what to order, and why the egg tart debate matters.
Transport — the ferries from Hong Kong, the terminals, the free casino shuttles, the airport, and how to move around an SAR that is dense and walkable in one neighbourhood and vast and car-dependent in the next.
Essentials — visas, currency, best time to visit, weather by month. The practical information that travel writers often skip because they assume everyone already knows it, and that readers often can’t find because of that assumption.

Geographic scope

Macau first. The site launched with Macau content and will develop Hong Kong and Greater Bay Area coverage as the second and third phases. If you are planning a trip that touches Macau — as a destination, as a day trip from Hong Kong, as a stopover between flights — you are in the right place.

Hong Kong is coming. The HK guides are in development. The ferry guide already exists because you can’t write about Macau transport without it. Full HK destination, hotel, food, and things-to-do coverage will follow.

The Greater Bay Area beyond that. Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Guangzhou, and the other GBA cities are on the roadmap for later phases. If you want to use Macau as a hub for the wider Pearl River Delta, there will eventually be content here that helps you do that.

How this site makes money

I run this site on affiliate commissions. When you click a booking link on macauholiday.com and complete a reservation, the partner platform pays a referral fee. You pay the same price either way — the commission comes from the platform’s margin, not yours.

Current affiliate partners: Agoda, Booking.com, Klook, GetYourGuide, Viator, and ferry operators including TurboJET and Cotai Waterjet.

What this means for the editorial:

Recommendations are made on what I actually think is good, not on which platform pays the highest commission rate. The Peninsula hotel section and the Cotai section give the same treatment to budget guesthouses that they give to the Ritz.
No operator pays to appear on this site. Paid placements are disclosed when they exist. Most don’t.
I don’t see who books what. Affiliate platforms send commission summaries, not customer names or itinerary details.

The full privacy breakdown is in the privacy policy. The legal framing is in the disclaimer.

What this site is — and isn’t

What it is: a publishing site written by a long-term resident with a photo library and an opinion. The goal is that the guides are detailed enough to plan a trip from and plain enough to be worth reading even if you never book anything.

What it isn’t:

A booking agent. I don’t take payment. Bookings happen on the partner platforms.
A complaints desk. If a hotel disappointed you or a tour didn’t run as described, that’s between you and the platform you booked through. I can fix broken links; I can’t process refunds on transactions I wasn’t part of.
A real-time pricing system. Prices and schedules change. The guides are updated when significant changes are confirmed, but always verify critical details directly with the provider before finalising plans.
A neutral aggregator. I have opinions. The Coloane guide recommends Fernando’s without hedging because Fernando’s deserves it. The hotel comparisons are not alphabetically neutral. The transport section tells you which ferry option is actually more convenient even when the answer isn’t the commercially obvious one.

The photography

Most of the images on this site are mine. Thirty-five years of walking the same streets produces a specific kind of archive — the Peninsula at 7am before the tour groups, the Inner Harbour in the rain, the Taipa Houses with the Cotai towers rising incongruously behind them. Original photography is the main thing that distinguishes this site from AI-generated travel content, and it’s the reason I intend to keep it current through quarterly visits.

Corrections and reader tips

Travel information changes. Ferry schedules shift. Hotels close or rebrand. Tour operators retire products. If something on this site is wrong or out of date, use the contact page and be specific: the page URL, the section, what’s changed. Corrections are made when verified.

If there’s something in Macau, Hong Kong, or the GBA that you think should be covered and isn’t, the same route applies. Reader knowledge shapes the publishing queue.

Where to start

If you’re new to the site, the destination hubs are the natural entry points: Macau Peninsula, Taipa, Coloane, Cotai Strip.

For transport, the Hong Kong to Macau Ferry guide is where most trips begin. For the arrival area specifically, the Outer Harbour guide covers the first hour.

For a first-time visit, the Things To Do in Macau page is the overview. For a longer stay, the 2 Days in Macau and 3 Days in Macau itineraries structure the time.

If you’ve read this far, m’goi for the attention. Whatever brings you to Macau — and something has, or you wouldn’t be here — the guides are here to get you there knowing what to expect.