Foreigners spend 700% more on Alipay in China over Labour Day holiday as inbound tourism slowly recovers

Outbound spending also increased on Ant Group’s mobile payment app, as Chinese tourists took more trips to places like Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea
Beijing has introduced measures aimed at boosting inbound tourism, including visa-free travel for a number of European and Southeast Asian countries

Ant Group

Xinmei Shen

Published: 12:04pm, 6 May 2024

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Inbound tourist spending through the mobile payment app Alipay surged during the Labour Day holiday in China this year, according to the app’s owner Ant Group, as overseas tourists slowly return to the country after the pandemic.

Spending that international travellers made with Alipay during the Labour Day “golden week” across mainland China jumped 700 per cent year on year, Ant said in a statement on Sunday. Ant is the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.

The app benefited from an increased number of international tourists brought in by China’s new visa-free entry policies, the company said.

The number of visitors – from 15 countries across Europe and Southeast Asia included in China’s visa exemption scheme – who used Alipay during the holiday was up fourfold this year, according to Ant.

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Tourism trouble: post-pandemic hurdles of China travel

Since the middle of last year, Beijing has introduced a series of measures aimed at boosting inbound tourism, including allowing travellers from countries including France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore and Malaysia to enter the country without a visa for 15 days for business, tourism, family visits and transit.

The government also expanded a visa-free transit policy that allows travellers from 54 countries to stay in China when passing through the country for up to 144 hours, as long as they have booked an onward ticket to another destination.

The efforts have resulted in a moderate recovery of inbound tourism. Foreign passport holders made 2.95 million trips to or from China in January and February, more than double that seen in the November-December period, an official from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism said in March.

Still, those numbers are just 41.5 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, as inbound tourism faces hurdles after the pandemic amid an increasingly challenging international environment.

Realising gains from policies aimed at boosting international travel takes “patience and effort”, Dai Bin, president of the state-run China Tourism Academy, wrote in an article in January.

The academy is expecting China’s inbound tourism market in 2024 to recover to half of that in 2019, it said in a February article posted to WeChat.

Chinese travellers’ overseas spending has also grown this year as outbound tourism picked up. Total overseas spending through Alipay rose 10 per cent year on year during the Labour Day holiday, Ant said.

Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, South Korea, the US, and Southeast Asian countries were the top destinations for Chinese tourists, according to the company.

Southeast Asia saw a 52 per cent increase in spending by Alipay users during the holiday, with Malaysia recording a 171 per cent year on year increase in tourist spending through the app. Alipay spending in Japan also surged 164 per cent, the company added, as a weaker yen helped tourists stretch their yuan a little further.