China’s most popular holiday travel destination is in Wuhan, the one-time COVID epicenter

29.09.2020 13:38

Fortune.com

It's the latest sign that China's travel industry is recovering as the 'Golden Week' holiday approaches

China’s October National Day holiday will be the country’s largest movement of people since before the pandemic, providing a chance for China to definitively show that life is back to normal in the country where COVID-19 first emerged.

Over the eight-day, ‘Golden Week’ holiday that starts Oct. 1, Chinese travelers are expected to make 600 million domestic trips within China, according to a new report from Chinese online travel operator Trip.com. “The demand on tourism that was suppressed for nine months will probably be released in these eight days,” Trip.com said in a statement to Fortune.

The holiday is still expected to fall short of the 782 million trips Chinese travelers completed during the same holiday last year. But due to China’s relative containment of COVID-19, authorities are confident that the tourism industry is poised to continue its rebound.

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“We are relatively optimistic about the tourism economy in the latter half of 2020,” China’s Tourism Academy said in a recent report.

So where are these tourists going?

Notably, the historic Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan, the city where COVID-19 first broke out, ranked No. 1 on Trip.com’s list of most sought-after tourist sites for the October holiday, followed by Shanghai’s Disneyland, and Xian’s Terracotta Warriors.

Travel demand for Wuhan underscores Chinese tourists’ confidence in their country’s handling of the pandemic and bodes well for China’s battered domestic travel industry. At the same time, the Chinese government is warning its citizens about the coronavirus risks of international trips, meaning Chinese tourists may continue to put off overseas travel, even as reopened countries try to woo them.

Lockdowns to Golden Week

Lockdown restrictions during February, March, and April brought travel within China to a halt, inflicting a hefty toll on the country’s domestic travel industry.

In total, China’s tourism revenue is expected to drop 52% in 2020 compared to 2019 and the number of individual trips is expected to decline 43% to 4.43 billion, according to the China Tourism Academy.

Still, China’s tourism industry has started to recover since the country’s domestic COVID-19 outbreak is largely under control.

Visitors wearing protective mask walk in the grounds of the Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan, China, on Aug. 8, 2020. The Yellow Crane Tower is China’s most sought-after tourist destination during this year’s October holiday, according to a new report.

The first major test of China’s travel recovery came in late spring, when China opened up leisure travel during its May day holiday and some 80 million Chinese travelers took trips around the country. In July, China loosened travel restrictions further and re-opened cross-province group tourism, which was considered a final push to get the industry back to normal.

Now, Beijing and China’s travel industry see the October National Day as a opportunity to convince any remaining skeptics that domestic travel is safe. Some 1,500 tourist sites in China are either dropping or heavily discounting gate fees during the holiday and local authorities are providing travel coupons as added incentive.

Safe travels

But China’s tourism push ends at its borders.

The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) reported earlier this month that 115 of 217 global destinations surveyed had started to ease travel restrictions for foreign tourists. As of late August, some 24 countries had fully reopened their borders to Chinese tourists, allowing them to enter without quarantines, Wolfgang Georg Arlt, director of the China Outbound Tourism Institute, wrote in a report on China’s travel industry. But even as barriers recede, Chinese tourists, who represent the world’s largest source of outbound travelers, may be slow to return abroad.

Crowds fill a railway station in Hangzhou in China’s Zhejiang province on Sept. 28, 2020. China’s railways are scheduled to carry 108 million passengers between Sept. 28 and Oct. 8.

Last week, China’s Centers for Disease Control released a set of safety guidelines for traveling amid the pandemic. It said that China is low-risk for COVID-19 infections, but much of the rest of the world presents a high risk of contracting the disease. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged Chinese travelers not to leave the country on Monday, launching a campaign that says if a foreign trip is ‘not essential, then don’t travel.’