China travel trends for 2024: more visa-free entry, domestic tourism to grow thanks to influencers, cultural tourism to favour smaller cities

China reopened its doors to tourists last year and although international travel is recovering slowly, domestic tourism experienced a boom

Influencers are promoting cultural experiences, which means second-tier cities such as Chengdu and Hangzhou are gaining popularity as destinations

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A craftsman working in China’s “porcelain capital”, Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province. Jingdezhen has been attracting a rising number of visitors as cultural tourism grows in China. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 6:15pm, 1 Jan 2024Updated: 3:23am, 4 Jan 2024

It has now been almost 10 months since China fully reopened its borders to foreign visitors, and almost a year since Beijing withdrew its advice to citizens warning them against overseas travel.

Travel to and from China has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels, but domestic travel has seen a surge in popularity.

“If you use 2019 as a benchmark, travel and tourism contributed 11.6 per cent to the Chinese economy,, to the Chinese GDP,” says Julia Simpson, president and chief executive of the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC). In that year, the travel and tourism industry employed 82 million people in China and was worth US$1.8 trillion.

Citing analysis released jointly by the WTTC and Oxford Economics, Simpson says that travel and tourism are estimated to have contributed 7.9 per cent to the Chinese economy in 2023, employing about 74 million people in an industry worth US$1.48 trillion.

Tourists look at giant pandas at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, in Chengdu, Sichuan province, in August 2023. Photo: Getty Images

“If you compare where China is to the rest of the world, it’s still slightly behind [in international recovery],” Simpson says, identifying the lack of airlift capacity and complex visa requirements as the main challenges.

“We have a little bit of a problem at the minute with people from the West, and particularly America, getting here by air because of the Russian airspace issues,” she says. “American airlines are not flying over Russian airspace [because of its war on Ukraine], so it means adding on some time.”