Yunnan tourism sees quickened rebound

The tourism market in Yunnan province has seen accelerated recovery. According to data from Yunnan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism and online travel service platforms, the province's tourism market showed a trend of recovery since the end of June. Data of the Tencent cloud computing monitoring center showed Yunnan received 1,045,400 tourists from other provinces and regions in June, an increase of 80.13% over the previous month.

At the beginning of this year, Yunnan province rolled out 13 articles to ease pressure of tourism businesses and 20 measures for their recovery and growth. It encouraged inbound tourist activities within the prefectures and cities, creating new products of cultural tourism. In addition, the Yunnan tourism market accelerated its recovery because of the recent favorable policies, such as resuming inter-provincial tours, canceling travel records to Covid-risk areas, issuing travel vouchers, and offering free or half-price tickets. As a result, the willingness to travel among Chinese folks has increased.

With "mini-tours" and "mini-vacations" forming new trends of tourism market, Lijiang city in northwest Yunnan innovated its tourism promotion and provided new tourist services, and local tourism market has thus showed an accelerated recovery momentum. According to preliminary estimates, Lijiang received 3,100,900 tourists in June, up 51.8% from the previous month. The total tourism revenue of the city was 5.013 billion yuan, up 51.8% from the previous month. The two figures represented 64% and 48% of those in 2019 respectively.

In south Yunnan’s Xishuangbanna Dai autonomous prefecture, tourism has recovered with the arrival of the 2022 "golden period" of summer vacation. Since July, Xishuangbanna Airport has seen a daily passengers of over 15,000, and 59 flights have been operated on the daily basis. Both numbers represented trends of growth.

To exert more positive effect, Yunnan is implement the policies pragmatically. Up to now, the province has refunded 200 million yuan to travel agencies for quality guarantee, subsidized cultural and travel enterprises with 28.96 million yuan in their working-capital loans, and rewarded hotels, five-star home stays and well-known hotel managers with a sum of 59.1 million yuan. 100 travel agencies and 20 art troupes were bailed out with 55.5 million yuan for job stabilization, with tax and fees reduced by 1.3 billion yuan for travel-related businesses. And 1.24 billion yuan of local debts were made to support the construction of cultural tourism projects.

In addition, Yunnan will pragmatically carry out the construction and investment of cultural tourism projects. Since the beginning of this year, the province has planned around 600 new tourism projects with a total investment of 2 trillion yuan. Among them, 56 large projects each costs an investment of over 10 billion yuan and 77 key projects each costs an investment of 5-10 billion yuan. At present, 765 cultural tourism projects are under construction in the province.

By Times reporters; Trans-editing by Wang Shixue