No respite in sight for China’s tourism sector 

The number of trips taken over China's recent three-day Mid-Autumn Festival holiday was significantly down on last year and next month’s Golden Week holiday is unlikely to bring any respite to the hard-pressed tourism and retail sectors.

By the numbers

• A total of 73.4 million trips were taken over the Mid-Autumn Festival according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism – that’s 16.7% down on 2021.
• At 1.28 million, trips by air were almost 60% down on 2021; trips by road fell 37% to 48.18 million; trips by boat were down 15% to 1.54 million.
• Tourism earnings were 28.68 billion yuan ($4.14bn ) – that’s 22.8% down on 2021.

Context

China’s strict approach to containing the Omicron variant of the COVID-19 coronavirus has meant the imposition and relaxation of curbs as necessary, including on travel. Reuters reports that people are being urged to refrain from non-essential trips ahead of the Golden Week holiday period at the start of October and the Communist Party Congress in the middle of next month.

Japanese brokerage and investment bank Nomura believes that “travel for family gatherings, tourism and retail sales will be severely hit in coming months including the National Day Golden Week holiday” and suggests that worsening tourism data will lead to downward revisions of GDP growth.

Sourced from Reuters