China’s travel and tourism industry was badly hit with the coronavirus outbreak in January, supressing travel demand, but with the slowing down of infected cases the country is getting back to normal with lifting of travel restriction as well as the reopening of attractions and cities.
The pent-up demand for travel among Chinese consumers was evident during the Labour (May) Day holiday (1-5 May) that saw 115 million Chinese took to the road, visiting domestic destinations and brought in 47.56 billion yuan (US$6.71 billion) in domestic tourism revenue, revealed Trip.com. Outbound travel to international destinations is still off limits.
“The performance of domestic tourism shows that confidence is gradually recovering. What we need to do is not to expect a rebound, but to try to come up with products that are better for our users – better deals and better marketing to speed up the recovery process,” James Liang, chairman of Trip.com Group.
The findings from Trip.com revealed young people were the main force of travel for this year’s May break, with the post-90s and post-00s accounting for more than half of the total bookings. Popular destinations for them included Jiuzhaigou, Chengdu, Zhangjiajie, Shanghai, Suzhou, Sanya, Beijing, Chongqing, Changzhou, Libo, Changsha and Huangshan in Anhui.
For all traveller the top three favourite destinations during the five-day holiday were Chengdu, Sanya and Shanghai.
However, travellers kept away from Hubei province where the epidemic first emerged. The 22 reopened tourist sites in the province attracted only over 109,000 visitors on 1 May, a drop of 87% from a year ago, according to Hubei’s tourism department. Tourism revenue saw a hit too, declining 95% to 6.79 million yuan.
Thematic tours were also in demand – not just among the young segment but across all age groups – with hiking, outdoor trips, cross-country and camping, a sign of the desire of most people to be out in the open after weeks of being locked in and confined to their house and apartment.
Many travellers opted to travel by car, accounting for more than 60% of travel during the May holidays. Car rental reported a 10% increase compared with the same period last year.
According to Trip.com, the pandemic has prompted scenic spots to accelerate online booking and smart tourism that ensures social distancing is implemented .
Smart tourism is the key in ensuring traveller numbers does not exceed 30% of the maximum capacity, while also practising social distancing. Initiatives include temperature monitoring, time interval booking, fully refundable bookings, routes to avoid crowds and free entrance for medical staff.
”Many scenic spots have proposed to set a quota of visitor numbers in advance. According to our data, more than 4,000 scenic spots are listed on our platform. 1-3 May bookings for tourist sites increased by 176% compared with the Qingming festival (Tomb-Sweeping Day on 4-5 April), and the number of people booking tickets also recovered to about 50% compared to the May break in 2019,” Trip.com stated.
Among the other findings are:
- High-quality and safe travel are the top priority for the platform users
- FITs 5 diamond FIT bookings is at 70%.
- New private small group tours of between three to six people are popular.
- 55% of travellers selected 4 and 5 diamond hotels.
As of time of writing, the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in China stood 82,885 with 77,957 recovered patients. The death toll of coronavirus cases in the country remained at 4,633 as no new fatalities were reported as of 6 May, said the National Health Commission. There are also no new confirmed cases of the virus reported in central Hubei, marking 33 consecutive days (from 4 April) when the province is free from infection, according to the provincial health commission.
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