“Full Recovery” by Year’s End—for Domestic Travel: Domestic tourism in China will most probably see a full recovery from the impact of COVID-19 by the end of this year, according an item posted on the website of Xinhua, China’s official state-sponsored news service. In a speech delivered at a recent industry summit held in Chengdu, Liang Jianzhang, chairman and co-founder of Trip.com Group (China’s largest travel company) said that China’s domestic tourism market has recovered from pre-pandemic levels by 80 percent so far, and positive growth has been witnessed in various localities.
Prior to Liang’s speech, China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism said that a total of 637 million visits were made across the country during the National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival holiday from Oct. 1 to 8, which represented 79 percent of the visits made during the same time last year on a comparable basis. Tourism revenue reached 466.56 billion yuan (about 68.5 billion U.S. dollars), a recovery of 69.9 percent of the revenue gained in the same period in 2019, according to the ministry.
As travel and tourism continue to improve, Liang told Xinhua that self-guided tours and medium-to-high-end leisure trips would experience “a robust recovery” among all types of trips. For the complete article, visit here.
Going to China? Leave Your Cash Home: It’s hard for those of us who live outside of China to grasp how paying for everything has gone digital in the country,” writes Shira Ovide of the New York Times, adding, “Most businesses there, from the fanciest hotels to roadside fruit stands, display a QR code — a type of bar code — that people scan with a smartphone camera to pay with China’s dominant digital payment apps, Alipay and WeChat. Paying by app is so much the norm that taxi drivers might curse at you for handing them cash.” Both informative and entertaining, the article is a quick and easy read for those U.S. travel suppliers and DMOs who would benefit from knowing more about a market that is increasingly cashless. Click here to read the complete article.
Today is Singles Day in China—We’ll get an Idea of How Much Disposable Income (the kind of spending that pays for international travel) Chinese consumers should be spending on travel to the USA. “Singles Day” is the name given to today by numerologists, retailers and other like-minded souls in China who deem that Nov. 11, or 11/11, is special enough to have a nickname or brand that means spend, spend, spend. Last year, Chinese consumers spent nearly $40 billion online on Singles Day—which is far more than the $16.8 billion that U.S. consumers spent online Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. This year, Alibaba is trying to increase the number of foreign brands participating. Tmall, Alibaba’s import and export business, will bring more than 2,600 new overseas brands to China for the first time, said Alibaba. Here’s an article on the subject.
