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China's tourist turn-offs: visitor numbers down thanks to rising yuan, pollution and visa issues

Complex visa rules, appreciating currency and pollution conspire to turn tourists away from China

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Amy Li
Illustration: Henry Wong
Tom Berger, a Norwegian photographer and avid traveller, has visited China twice in the past five years. While he enjoyed learning about Chinese culture and making new friends during the trips, he found acquiring a China visa an enormous hassle.
Tom Berger
Besides a visa fee of €60 (HK$520), Berger says he had to pay another €75 for a third-party company to handle his application, as his city doesn't have a Chinese embassy. The combined cost, €135, was about a quarter of the price of a round-trip flight from Norway.

China also requires a travel itinerary in advance and this is also a turnoff, says Berger, who likes to improvise his journey once he arrives.

"My travel plans also often change when I meet other travellers who recommend places not to miss, and the pre-set itinerary makes this difficult," he says.

Rather than face such hurdles, Berger now gives China a miss and heads for more tourist-friendly Asian destinations like Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan and Thailand.

While a record number of Chinese travelled overseas in 2014, spending hundreds of billions of US dollars, the country's inbound tourism suffered another year-on-year decline, a trend experts and travellers say is exacerbated by its appreciating currency, pollution and complicated visa requirements.

Statistics released by the China National Tourism Administration (NTA) and the World Tourism Organisation (WTO), an agency of the United Nations, revealed the dimming enthusiasm for China among international travellers in 2014, a year when other top Asia destinations reported robust growth.

China recorded 116.9 million inbound tourist arrivals in 2014 up to November, a 1.1 per cent decrease compared to the same period in 2013, according to the NTA. Of these, only 24 million visits were made by travellers with foreign passports - 69.4 million visits were made by Hongkongers, 18.6 million visits by people in Macau, and 4.9 million by Taiwan residents.

In 2011, China reported 135.4 million tourist arrivals. But in 2012, the number slid 2.2 per cent to 132.4 million. In 2013, it dropped 2.5 per cent to 129 million, according to the NTA.

If pollution, censorship and complex visa requirements were not enough to keep tourists away, many visitors complain that travelling to and within China is becoming more expensive.

Liu Simin, a scholar and deputy secretary of the Beijing Tourism Association, a government-sponsored research body, says the appreciating yuan in recent years has discouraged international visitors.

China's currency, despite being theoretically pegged to the US dollar, has appreciated more than 20 per cent against the US dollar over the past decade. In 2004, one US dollar bought more than 8 yuan; it's worth just 6.2 yuan today.

"With China becoming more expensive, tourists interested in Asia are naturally drawn to China's neighbours, especially those with more developed service industries," Liu says.

While China, the top destination in Asia, suffered a slowdown, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and even South Korea all enjoyed rapid growth in the first 10 months of 2014, according to the WTO.

Japan, Taiwan and Korea recorded double-digit growth. For Hong Kong, the second largest destination in the region, it was a healthy 9 per cent.

It would appear that China is losing its allure not only to European tourists like Berger, but also Americans. In 2013, the number of US tourists fell slightly to 2.08 million, from 2.11 million in 2012. In the first three quarters of 2014, the number dropped to 1.54 million, according to the NTA.

"China is far away, and airfares are not cheap," says Bruce Rubin, a public relations executive based in Miami, Florida. Rubin made business trips to Shanghai and Hong Kong in 2013, but said the lure of China among Americans was still "strong".

But others are definitely put off by China's complicated, even invasive, visa requirements.

"China has some of the most complicated requirements of any Asian country for citizens of Western countries," says David Rand, a US citizen who now teaches in Kunming , Yunnan province.

Tourism experts on the mainland say the slowdown of inbound tourism was to be expected after years of rapid growth since the early 1980s. Photo: Simon Song
Rand says he doesn't need a visa for Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and South Korea, while Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia allow him to get a visa upon arrival.

Yet to get a visa to China, Rand needs to get either proof of round-trip air tickets and at least three nights of accommodation, or a letter of invitation from a Chinese citizen or organisation.

"China shouldn't make the complicated visa application process a turn-off for visitors," says Li Jinglong, an assistant professor at the department of tourism management at Anhui University's School of Business. "Only by making the process easier will it attract more people to visit."

Tourism experts on the mainland say the slowdown of inbound tourism was to be expected after years of rapid growth since the early 1980s.

"China's outbound tourism is hot because it's only getting started, yet we have been developing the inbound tourism market for many years," says Liu. A developed market will have a slower growth rate, he argues.

Dai Bin, the head of China Tourism Academy, holds a similar view.

"The veil of mystery has been lifted now and China needs to do more to attract visitors," Dai said in a recent interview with a Chinese magazine. "This means China is now competing with other countries."

Dai, chairman of the research organisation affiliated with China National Tourism Administration, concedes that China's censorship might have played a role in driving away tourists.

"I assume people like to know that the taxi drivers [in the destination country] won't overcharge them, and they would be able to log into their favourite social-networking site," he told the magazine.

Social sites including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are inaccessible in mainland China, which also blocks global news sites such as The Chinese authorities have tightened their grip on media and internet in recent years, cracking down on more websites.

But many tourists don't see this as a huge deterrent. "I believe pollution and censorship have little or no bearing on the decision-making process of a potential tourist," says Rubin. "After all, they're just visiting for a few days or weeks."

China's strained relations with its Asian neighbours, especially Japan, have driven away potential visitors, says Li Jinglong.

"Japan has long been an important source market for China's tourism," Li says. "But it's quickly changing."

Indeed, figures by the NTA show the number of Japanese visitors to China steadily slid in recent years. Numbers dropped to 2.87 million in 2013 from 3.73 million in 2000. Li believes the growing tensions between the two countries over a territorial dispute have contributed to the shrinking numbers.

Although both countries have now moved tentatively on rebuilding relations, experts believe with nationalism brewing in both countries, leaders on both sides will remain cautious and obstacles are plentiful.

Li says China should launch a massive campaign to woo international tourists.

He also believes that improvements in tackling pollution, easing the tense relations with neighbours, and simplifying the visa application process would help in boosting the number of tourist arrivals.

When Tom Wiles, an engineer from Virginia, US visited Chengdu , Sichuan , for the first time in 2007 with his wife, he fell in love with its hospitable residents, tasty cuisine and laid-back city life.

"There were very few motor vehicles; most people were on bikes or scooters, buses or taxis," he says, recalling his first trip. "We roamed empty streets at night in a cousin's car."

Yet when the couple returned in 2011 for a three-week family visit, Wiles noticed that the city had changed "remarkably".

"Chengdu had gone from a lot of scooters, a few bicycles to cars everywhere," he says. "This time the cars were parked on the sidewalks because they had run out of curb space."

Traffic had become congested and a walk to his favourite farmer's market was now "a walk through the maze of parked cars," he adds.

By then, the local government had built an elevated second-ring highway to relieve the city's traffic problems, which had worsened with the growing number of vehicles.

"China seems to be very pragmatic in the face of a changing world and has embraced many proven techniques to improve the lives of ordinary people," says Wiles.

"If China can continue to use proven technology for transportation, use cleaner fuel like natural gas instead of coal, the problems will be solved in time with proper planning."

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Many hurdles to enter the dragon
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