Chinese abroad tourism regains vigor despite problems

With the beginning of China's borders in March this year after the period of the Covid-19 epidemic, more and more Chinese are going abroad. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism (chin. 文化和旅游部) together with the Institute for Tourism investigation of China (chin. 中国旅游研究院) published a study entitled “Big Data study on abroad Travel in the First Half of 2023” 《2023年上半年出境旅游大数据报告》.

At the moment, the Chinese can travel to 138 countries of the planet without prior request for a visa, which is good information for both tourists and travel offices and airlines. This situation has established China as the world’s largest origin of tourists travelling abroad.

China itself is increasing request for distant tourism. In the first half of this year, 40.37 million tourists went abroad as part of tourist trips from mainland China. The most popular destinations in China are presently Japan, South Korea, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Australia and fresh Zealand and the United States. another "favorite" destinations of Chinese tourists are South-East Asian countries, including Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, or the United arabian Emirates (Duba).

One of the obstacles to restoring the size of Chinese abroad tourism to the level of 3 years ago is, among others, inactive besides fewer direct global flights at inactive very advanced prices. Overall, current ticket prices are inactive higher than before the epidemic, but have been steadily decreasing since the beginning of the year.

Average global ticket prices at the beginning of August this year were almost 80% lower compared to prices in August of last year, but were inactive 10% to 20% higher than at the same time in 2019.

In January of that year, the average price of air tickets on global routes was 136% higher than in the same period in 2019, but already in July this year the difference was only 29%.

Air connections are slow restored from China to the United States. present it is only 6.6% of the state of 2019. As of the end of October, only 24 calls per week (in September it was 18) will be operational when, before the outbreak, there were a full of about 3000.

For flights in economical class from Shanghai to San Francisco and back in mid-September you had to pay more than 20,000 RMBs (approx. 11 304 PLN), while before the epidemic from many Chinese cities you could fly to the United States for just 3000 RMBs (approx. 1700 PLN). For comparison: for about 10 1000 RMBs (about 5652 PLN) you can fly from Shanghai to London or Paris.

Visas are also obstacle to restoring tourism to pre-emergence levels.

This is not about the complex and demanding many papers of the procedure for obtaining them, but about the waiting time for their release. The embassies and consulates were amazed by the number of people willing to go abroad after China's three-year lockdown. Consular units have reduced the number of visa staff. The consequence is that now in Shanghai, for a nipponese or Korean visa you gotta wait about a week to two, but already for a French or British visa the waiting time is 8 or even 10 weeks. For German and Polish visas you gotta wait for 3 months.

In the case of the US consulate, the substance is even more interesting. Applications submitted in October will be examined in March and April next year.

Source:

toutiao.com

Author: 梁安基 Andrzej Z. Liang, 上海 Shanghai, 中国 China

Email: [email protected]

Editorial: Leszek B.

Email: [email protected]

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