Analyzing China’s Travel Reopening, Exactly A Year In

05.01.2024 - 18:08 / skift.com / Rafat Ali

It’s one of the biggest questions in global tourism: What the hell is happening to tourism from China? It’s a question a lot of us tried to answer throughout 2023 after China reopened – on January 8 – after 3 years of lockdown.

We turned to Gary Bowerman, the founder of Check-in Asia, to help our thinking. He’s been in Asia as a travel analyst, has written books about the Chinese traveler and has been writing a newsletter about the Asia travel economy during Covid and post-Covid.

Below are highlights from the conversation with Bowerman and Skift founder and CEO Rafat Ali. You can hear the full interview here.

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Host: Rafat Ali
Guest: Gary Bowerman
Producer: Jose Marmolejos

Bowerman: A year ago, when China reopened the 8th of January, expectations were really, really high that automatically we’d press and play and go back to the 2019 levels when China was the dominant figure in travel and tourism. That hasn’t happened. But we’ve seen gradual growth through the year.

And I think right now at the beginning of 2024, if you talk to people in the Chinese travel industry, there is a much greater sense of optimism that 2024 will be a stronger year. There were so many factors that were limiting growth last year.

Bowerman: You can’t divorce Chinese tourism from trade and diplomacy. And the Chinese government has been very clear about this. In 2017, 2018, 2019, [China] had the world’s largest outbound market, and it was prepared to use that in leverage in trade discussions, in diplomacy, not just in Asia-Pacific, although specifically in Asia-Pacific, but also worldwide.

So that’s really where we were at as the gates came down for Covid-19. You had this world’s largest outbound market and China was really using this in trade and diplomacy. When the gates started to come up a year ago, China was very, very wary to not allow Chinese travelers to go out all at once, because it realized that demand would be quite low. The aviation industry, the OTAs in China weren’t ready either.

So it wanted to phase this back across the year. And by doing that, by phasing it back across the year, allowing countries worldwide on a phased basis beginning in February, then March and then August to accept group travel … that then opened up the gates to start negotiating on things like visas, as we’ve seen in recent weeks.

But also on trade policy, China right now has a lot that it wants to sell to the world in travel and tourism. It wants to sell its high-speed rail technology, it wants to sell its new passenger jets.

And so as we start to see China unroll this tourism policy, it will be ever more closely linked to travel and trade. And I think what