Covid continues to blight China’s attempts at economic recovery with latest figures from the Golden Week holiday pointing to a “discouraging” slump in travel and spending, according to Nomura analysts.
Coronavirus cases have been rising again in some of China’s popular tourist regions and the new BF.7 variant has been detected for the first time.
National domestic tourism trips and revenues were down 18.2% and 26.2% y-o-y, respectively, last week, worsening from the contractions of 16.7% and 22.8% seen during the Mid-Autumn Festival, which ran from September 10-12.
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“Compared with 2019’s pre-pandemic levels, tourism trips and revenues were down 39.3% and 55.8%, respectively,” observed the Nomura note.
“The daily number of passenger trips during this year’s National Day Golden Week was 36.4% below that in 2021, 44.1% below that in 2020, and 58.1% below 2019’s pre-pandemic levels.”
Although the Golden Week holiday saw some easing of lockdowns in China, a number of tourist destinations still imposed stringent curbs over the same period.
The Nomura note went on: “Xishuangbanna, a popular tourist city in the southern Yunnan province, has been under a de facto full lockdown since October 4, while Xinjiang has banned all people from leaving the region as a local outbreak emerged a few days into the Golden week.
Golden Week ‘Dilemma’
“Haikou, the capital city of China’s tourism heavyweight Hainan province, also imposed a full lockdown on October 6.”
Nomura said there was a “clear dilemma” before Golden Week and that people could either choose to stay local and not travel – hitting revenues – or choose to travel extensively, bringing with it an inevitable rise in Covid case numbers.
In the end, Nomura said, it observed a combination of the two and revenues were worse than previous holidays this year, including the Mid-Autumn Festival, June’s Dragon Boat and the Labour Day Golden Week.
- By Sean O’Meara
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