China Travel News

IHG isn’t expanding at the rate of some of its competitors. The company’s review process of poorly performing Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza properties can’t end soon enough.

Macau is an extraordinarily important gaming market for Las Vegas Sands, and the company’s third quarter earnings call was a giant love fest for China’s gaming regulators. What else are company leaders going to do but schmooze the people in charge of renewing their gaming license?

The U.S. and China are riding a hotel performance see-saw where one goes up as the other comes down. But travel analysts and executives are downplaying the notion the Delta variant is going to lead to a travel doomsday scenario over the fall and winter.

Got the pandemic under control? That remains a key factor for Chinese tourists to go abroad, a new sentiment survey from Dragon Trail shows. None of that "living-with-the-virus" approach that some Asian destinations are starting to embrace.

In Skift's top stories this week, IHG makes further inroads in the luxury sector, the travel industry grapples with the prolonged absence of Chinese visitors, 2021 emerges as the year of travel companies going public, and the trend of tour operator mergers continues.

China's prolonged absence from global tourism could be impacting more than tourism revenues. Yet, geopolitics aside, Chinese consumer demand for long-haul travel is still alive and well, and it's getting stronger.

China must weigh whether the economic pain is worth the price of such tough lockdown measures in response to outbreaks that pale in comparison to those seen in markets like the U.S.

It took China longer than usual to get over its latest outbreak, even though the country takes a tougher approach than most in curbing the spread of Covid. Vaccines can help prevent another wave of lockdowns and brutal declines in demand amid a surge of cases around the world.

Bookings Holdings Fintech boss Daniel Marovitz says payments is arguably the world's largest industry. Across the online travel universe, look for payments to eventually become a line item — and very material to companies' financials.