MACAU (BLOOMBERG) - Macau's gaming revenue grew for a third-straight month in October, as China's week-long Golden Week public holiday brought a surge in visitors to the city's new tourist-friendly projects, including the local resorts of Las Vegas Sands and Wynn Resorts.

Gross gaming revenue rose 8.8 per cent to 21.8 billion patacas (S$3.8 billion), according to Macau's Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau. That compares to the median estimate for a 5.5 per cent advance in a Bloomberg survey of seven analysts.

The growth girds momentum in reversing a 26-month slump as the world's biggest casino hub transforms itself into a family-friendly tourist destination.

"The strong October number is more due to the new projects which will attract an increase in tourists and mass gamblers," said Mr Aaron Fischer, an analyst at CLSA Ltd before the numbers were released.

Macau, the only place in China where casinos are legal, have opened new billion-dollar resorts that target recreational gamblers instead of the high rollers that form the bulk of its gambling receipts. Nearly a million Chinese tourists visited the former Portuguese enclave in the first seven days of October for Golden Week, the most in at least a decade.