China the Great Tourist Exporter Turns Focus Inward — What It Means
Photo Credit: China plans to prioritize boosting its domestic tourism market for the next five years. Flickr Commons / Joe Hart
Skift Take
Whether China manages to keep Omicron out of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games will likely help determine its future reopening timeline, more so than its new five-year tourism plan, which makes fewer references to outbound travel.
China’s inbound and outbound travel may remain restricted, but a post-Covid isolationist approach hasn’t prevented it from planning for the future of its tourism sector as a key pillar of the Chinese economy.
By 2025, China's domestic market — particularly rural tourism, including cultural and outdoor recreation — will have progressed and developed "vigorously.” But inbound and outbound tourism will be prioritized step by step and "under the premise that the international pandemic is effectively controlled.”
That’s the key message from China’s five-year tourism development plan for 2021-2025, released by China’s State Council just a fortnight before the Beijing Winter Olympics kick off on February 4.
The 25-page digital version of the report makes fewer references to inbound and outbound visitation than it does to domestic travel, pointing to a focus that will be largely inward in development in the short-term. Talk of th
