As industry recovers from pandemic, travel business surges
China’s tourism market has made a remarkable recovery since July 14 when inter-provincial travel resumed after months of suspension due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and industry practitioners forecast a recovery to pre-virus levels by 2021.
“From July 15 to August 12, travel consultations via telephone and at our outlets in Beijing increased about 410 percent month-on-month. Over the same period, the number of inter-provincial travelers surged 741 percent month-on-month,” Xu Xiaolei, the marketing manager of China’s CYTS Tours Holding Co, told the Global Times Monday.
Seeing the explosive recovery in domestic tourism, CYTS Tours’ outbound tour department is shifting its focus to domestic travel.
A report from domestic online travel agency Ctrip showed that more than 4,000 travel agencies have launched travel products on the platform since the resumption of inter-provincial travel, an increase of 100 percent. More than 80 percent of domestic travel agencies that cooperate with Ctrip have resumed business, the company said.
Over the past month, the usual hustle and bustle has been returning to tourist attractions across the country. The government in Central China’s Hubei Province announced earlier this month that it would offer free admission to nearly 400 local tourism attractions. By Friday more than 2.3 million visits had been made to those sites with over 3,800 tour groups being received, media reports said.
Domestic online travel app Qunar told the Global Times Monday that inter-provincial travel to nearby cities over the past month had recovered to 90 percent of the year-earlier level. Long-distance tour groups and self-guided tours had recovered to around 50 percent of the year-earlier level.
During the summer holiday, the number of tour groups accounted for 74 percent of the total number of tourists and Southwest China’s Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan provinces became hot travel destinations.
“Since the beginning of August, the combined occupancy rate on average has been 84 percent, compared with 50-70 percent in June and July,” a manager of a hotel in Sichuan Province told the Global Times.
“In addition to established online travel platforms such as Ctrip, Qunar and Tongcheng-Elong, other platforms including Meituan, and Alibaba’s Fliggy, have started reaching out to hotels and inviting us to expand our presence on their platforms,” said the manager, who preferred to be anonymous.
Ji Zhiying, a travel industry analyst at Beijing-based consulting and research firm Analysys, told the Global Times on Monday that domestic tourism during the National Day holiday in October and in the second half of the year overall is expected to recover to around 70-80 percent of year-earlier levels.
Industry practitioners said that new challenges are accompanying the resumption of domestic travel — for example, consumers’ lack of enthusiasm amid concerns over a resurgence of COVID-19 cases and worries about having meals in large groups.
Ji said that domestic inter-provincial travel during the golden week of the National Day holiday may see fewer student groups compared with last year, as provinces now prohibit such travel for primary and secondary school students ahead of the start of the semester.
Universities are likely to follow to curb the spread of coronavirus. “The policy could be extended until the semester ends,” she said.
“For the sake of epidemic prevention, the size of tour groups will be limited. For example, a bus can only carry passengers at 50 percent of its capacity. As a result, the cost of group tours will rise, making it more difficult for travel agencies to make profits.
“But since the COVID-19 outbreak earlier this year, small customized tours have become mainstream, which is helping the recovery of tourism,” said Ji.
Xu said the agency is cautiously optimistic that domestic travel could basically recover to pre-virus levels during the Chinese Spring Festival in February 2021. “However, given big uncertainties over a possible rebound of the new virus during winter, we can’t be overly optimistic,” he said.
Employees at a forest park in Binzhou, Central China’s Hunan Province work on a project. As trans-provincial travel in China resumed after a months-long suspension due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the usual hustle and bustle is returning to tourist attractions across the country. Photo: cnsphoto
