Travel in city Shanghai

The situation on the ground in China isn’t ideal as the country readies to remove its travel restrictions this weekend.

China, grappling with a new wave of COVID-19 infections, took another step towards loosening its pandemic-related restrictions on Saturday when Hong Kong‘s leader announced it would aim to re-open its borders with the mainland by mid-January.

An end to China’s travel curbs this month is expected to revive demand in the global luxury retail market, which has been starved of mainland visitors for three years, but many consumers now see more reasons to do their high-end shopping locally.

U.S. carrier United Airlines Holdings Inc said on Tuesday it is currently evaluating the market demand and operating environment to determine when to resume additional flight operations to mainland China.

Three years of COVID-19 forced Becky Zhang’s specialty food business in Macau to near collapse. Founded by her grandmother more than fifty years ago, her store selling pastries and dried beef only survived thanks to residents who bought small quantities to help keep them afloat.

U.S. and European airlines will benefit from pent-up demand for travel to China after its recent border reopening, but route approvals, fresh Covid-19 testing rules and not enough large aircraft remain barriers to rising sales, analysts and industry officials say.

Chinese hotels and restaurants are seeking employees amid demand recovery in the services sector after the end of Beijing’s zero-COVID protocols, with a survey by a leading recruiter showing a surge in job openings in the hospitality industry.

Accor, the Paris-based hotel giant, will reveal on Thursday a new global “soft” brand, Handwritten Collection, featuring so-called lifestyle hotels. These mid-priced properties have funky furniture and buzzy restaurants and bars but don’t offer the full services of a premium boutique.

Walt Disney Corporation CEO Bob Iger is optimistic about the future of Disney theme parks, even as he announced his company was cutting 7,000 jobs from its workforce, reorganizing and slashing $5.5 billion in costs during Wednesday’s first quarter earnings call. 

Abel Zhao, co-founder & CEO of FreeD Group, a technology innovator that specializes in proprietary enterprise application solutions, has acquired 75-year-old Connexus Travel from the parent company of Cathay Pacific, Swire Group. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Here are some excerpts from Daily Lodging Report from the past week. If you’re not a subscriber, you should be. Get news on hotel deals, development, stocks, and career moves. Sign up here, now.

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the committee’s top Republican urged the Biden administration to halt Chinese airlines and other non-American carriers from flying over Russia on U.S. routes.

Anko van der Werff has a thing for airline bankruptcies. Either they follow him or he follows them. All of the three previous airlines he has worked for and led, Aeromexico as CCO, and as CEOs of Avianca and now SAS have gone through their rites of passage after he joined or after he left. And he relishes his role as tthye sharp but genial turnaround artist.

Here are some excerpts from Daily Lodging Report from the past week. If you’re not a subscriber, you should be. Get news on hotel deals, development, stocks, and career moves. Sign up here, now.

As Radisson Hotels Group continues to expand internationally through its existing brands, its strategy is to focus on service quality and consistency. For Federico González, CEO of the hotel group, having nine big global brands is better than chasing a mass of weak brands.

China said that it will reopen its borders to foreign tourists for the first time in the three years since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic by restoring the issuance of all types of visas from Wednesday.

As India plans to increase connectivity to the rest of the country, the government has approved 21 greenfield airports in smaller cities. A total of 11 such airports are operational so far, the latest being the Shivamogga airport in the south Indian state of Karnataka. Since 2018, eight airports, namely Pakyong (Sikkim), Kannur (Kerala), Kalaburagi (Karnataka), Sindhudurg (Maharashtra), Kushinagar (Uttar Pradesh), Orvakal (Andhra Pradesh) and Mopa (Goa) airports have been operationalized apart from Shivamogga. The government of India has formulated the greenfield policy for construction of greenfield airport, for which the state government or airport operator has to identify the site and get the feasibility study conducted for construction of airport. Greenfield projects are initiated on undeveloped ground and do not include the renovation or demolition of an existing building. There are no constraints from any previous work on the ground. The government has also granted site clearance for construction of three greenfield airports — Alwar in Rajasthan, Singrauli in Madhya Pradesh and Mandi in Himachal Pradesh. The responsibility of implementation of airport projects including funding of the projects rests with the concerned airport developer including the respective state government in case it is the project proponent. With India’s passenger traffic expected to double by 2030, International Air Transport Association (IATA) expects India to be the world’s third-largest air passenger market by 2030. In the post pandemic recovery, the civil aviation industry in India has emerged as one of the fastest-growing industries.

A San Fransisco-based advisory firm is seeing more company bosses and their entourages embark on fact-finding trips around the world to gain better business insights.

India will invest around $12 billion over the next two years in airports, aircraft and recruitment to meet the booming demand for air travel. The country aims to increase the number of airports from the present 148 to 220 by 2025, for which private builders will contribute roughly $9 billion, with the balance coming from the government-run Airports Authority of India. It entails new terminal construction, greenfield projects, and refurbishment of existing buildings, including old military airfields from the colonial era, as per a Bloomberg report. “We need to put in place the civil aviation infrastructure and capabilities that by 2047 would be able to support a $20 trillion economy within India,” said the country’s civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia at the ongoing CAPA India Aviation Summit in New Delhi. Scindia said passenger capacity at India’s six major airports is expected to grow to 420 million in four years from 192 million today, and Indian carriers’ fleet will grow to 2,000 aircraft in five years from 700. Additionally, India has eased leasing rules for airlines to lease more aircraft to address aircraft shortages as travel rebounds from the pandemic. He also highlighted how India had tweaked its airplane leasing program to enable airlines to add more aircraft to meet passenger demand, including more “wet leasing,” or renting of planes with crew, for domestic and international routes. Tata Group-owned Air India last month announced a record order for 470 jets and is due to take another 25 leased aircraft.

Urs Kessler, who runs Jungfrau Railways, a train that takes tourists up the highest mountain in Switzerland, was excited for the return of Chinese tourists after COVID-19 restrictions were lifted late last year.

Reducing visa delays has been a priority for the U.S. consulates in India as wait times for visitor visas has gone down from more than 600 days to 247 days in New Delhi, 332 days in Mumbai, 357 days in Kolkata, while in Chennai the wait is still around 680 days. Skift had earlier reported about how the U.S. Consulate in India had been taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to reduce visa wait times. India ranks sixth among the top source markets for the U.S, said Jackie Ennis, vice president, global markets for Brand USA. A total of 1.25 million arrivals were registered from India in 2022. The latest figures in February revealed that 203,540 Indians travelled to the U.S. so far between January and February. In 2019, Indian travelers spent $16.5 billion in the U.S. The destination marketeer for the U.S. — Brand USA conducted its 2023 India Sales Mission in Mumbai and Delhi last week. Speaking at the event Ennis spoke about how the air connectivity between the two countries has been strengthened with Air India launching two direct flights to San Francisco from Bengaluru and Mumbai in December last year and from Mumbai to New York (JFK) in February. With this, Air India now has 46 weekly non-stop flights between the two countries, in addition to seven weekly direct flights operated from Newark to Delhi by United Airlines and seven weekly direct flights from New York (JFK) to Delhi by American Airlines. Calling India a fast-growing market with tremendous potential for growth in tourism, Ennis added, “We are thrilled to see a heightened interest in exploring beyond the gateways to lesser-known destinations.”