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Opinion | How China can make life better for foreign and domestic tourists alike
- Refining entry policies, mobile payment systems and rail travel can help make the mainland an easier and more welcoming travel destination
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What a difference a year makes. In June 2023, when my family visited China, we had to deal with a complex Covid-19 declaration, rely on my daughter-in-law to pay for purchases using her WeChat account and go through two travel agents to get our rail tickets.
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Since then, China has dispensed with pandemic regulations, greatly liberalised visas for foreign visitors, nudged second-tier hotels to accept foreign guests and, importantly, WeChat has opened its payment system to international credit cards.
China is clearly pushing to win over foreign tourists and their spending. According to the National Immigration Administration, the mainland attracted 14.6 million foreign visitors in the first half of 2024 – almost 1 million more than in the whole of 2023.
However, that number is still less than half the number from 2019. Clearly, Beijing has a way to go to restore pre-pandemic levels of tourists.
China faces structural barriers, particularly on air connectivity. The number of inbound flights is still far lower than before the pandemic. In June, China was served by 366 flights each week from the US. That is down by three-quarters from the 1,563 flights per week in January-June 2019.
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China set to open its borders to foreign tourists for the first time since Covid-19 pandemic
China set to open its borders to foreign tourists for the first time since Covid-19 pandemic
At the same time, there is much China can do to attract more foreign tourists. One improvement would be to further refine its entry policies, as they still fall short of those in Thailand, for example.
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