The global tourism industry is expected to get a boost as China, one of the world's largest outbound tourism markets before the pandemic, resumed outbound group tours on Monday. Tour operators in China are seeing a rapid recovery of the industry with travelers eager to take advantage of the nation's optimized COVID-19 policies to offset the impact that outbound tourism came to a near standstill over the past three years.
Starting Monday, China resumed outbound group travel to 20 countries, including Thailand, the Maldives, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and New Zealand.
The move, announced in January, sparked a frenzy of trip planning and saw online searches for overseas destinations spike, with Thailand being the most popular.
In the meantime, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced on Friday that travel agencies could resume booking group travel to Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions from Monday.
The Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council also announced on Friday the normalization of group tours between the mainland and the two SARs.
Mainland and Hong Kong railway authorities have agreed to remove the requirement for passengers traveling to Hong Kong on the Guangzhou-Hong Kong High-speed Railway to present negative nucleic acid test results.
Under the new policy, overseas travelers departing the two regions who haven't traveled to other international destinations within seven days of departure can enter the mainland without a negative nucleic acid test result.
Thanks to the new policies, tourism operators are expecting to see a boom in outbound travel.
Travel portal Tuniu said as of Monday afternoon, bookings for overseas trips on its platform had surged 324 percent from the previous day. Bookings made for outbound travel this week are double the number of those made in the previous week, the travel portal said.
Early Monday, the first tour group departed from Guangzhou, Guangdong province, to travel to the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, marking the resumption of outbound group tours.
Among the 20 selected destinations for group tours, Thailand, the Maldives and Singapore remain the most popular choices for Chinese travelers, travel agencies said.
Hong Kong and Macao are also expected to attract more visitors and tourism revenue. Information from travel agencies shows their growing popularity as travel destinations after COVID-19 control and entry policies were eased in early January.
Online travel agency Trip.com Group said that searches for tour packages to Hong Kong and Macao rose three times after the State Council made the announcement in December.
Outbound tourism is still in the preliminary stage of recovery, and the high price of flights and limited direct flights to overseas destinations may deter domestic travelers, according to experts.
