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https://scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3202380/hainan-offers-discounts-promotions-and-duty-free-goodies-chinas-hawaii-rolls-out-red-carpet-attract
Business/ China Business

Hainan offers discounts, promotions and duty-free goodies as ‘China’s Hawaii’ rolls out the red carpet to attract winter travellers

  • A duty-free New Year’s Carnival kicked off in Haikou today, featuring discounts of up to 70 per cent at selected shops, and a horological expo with 13 global brands
  • The carnival lasts until the 15th day of the 2023 Lunar New Year on February 5, according to a press statement
Tourists at a beach in the Hainan provincial capital of Haikou on May 1, 2019. Photo: Xinhua

Hainan’s duty-free merchants are throwing discounts and reward points at visitors, after China’s southernmost province scrapped its anti-Covid restrictions for inbound travellers to fill the half-empty hotels and resorts in the remaining months of the winter tourist season.

A duty-free New Year’s Carnival kicked off in Hainan’s provincial capital Haikou today, featuring discounts of up to 70 per cent at selected shops, and a horological expo with 13 global brands until the 15th day of the 2023 Lunar New Year on February 5, according to a press statement.

The shopping carnival will run through the Lunar New Year holiday starting from January 22, said the Hainan Department of Commerce’s Inspector Yao Lei.

Hainan’s subtropical climate, sandy beaches and resort hotels have long been the favourite sanctuary of Russian and Chinese tourists from the northern hemisphere’s frigid winter, so much so that street signs in Sanya city are written in Chinese, pinyin and Cyrillic script. The province is pulling out all stops to roll out the red carpet, making up for the time lost this recent summer when a draconian pursuit of zero-Covid stranded tens of thousands of tourists and ended in a publicity disaster for a tourism-dependent province often dubbed “China’s Hawaii.”

Hainan has been trying for years to remake itself into a duty-free tourism destination. Chinese tourists spent more than 180 billion yuan (US$25.8 billion) overseas on duty-free products in 2019, or 40 per cent of total global duty-free sales. Hainan, which is being built into China’s largest free-trade port and a duty-free hub, will account for half of the domestic duty-free market by 2025.

The tourism industry was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and China’s stringent zero-Covid pursuit. The number of visitors to Hainan shrank by 47.2 per cent in October, from a year earlier. Sanya, where Fosun Tourism Group operates its Atlantis Sanya water theme resort, saw a 65.6 per cent plunge in the number of visitors, according to the local tourism authority.

Tourists were put off when local health authorities locked Sanya down suddenly in August to control a resurgent Covid-19 outbreak. An estimated 80,000 tourists were trapped, some being plucked from the airport departure gate to go straight into quarantine, often at their own expense.

Hainan’s average number of inbound and outbound flights from September 1 to December 6 slumped 58.8 per cent from the same period in 2019, according to the data provided by aviation data and services provider Flight Master.

Haikou, Sanya and other provincial cities scrapped their Covid classification system, which had previously subjected visitors to varying degrees of quarantine and isolation based on the severity of infections in their communities.

Hainan received 162 inbound flights every day on average in December, with the record peaking at 219 on December 5, according to data from VariFlight.

Shoppers at a duty-free shop in the Hainan provincial capital of Haikou in southern China on February 3, 2022. Photo: Xinhua.
Shoppers at a duty-free shop in the Hainan provincial capital of Haikou in southern China on February 3, 2022. Photo: Xinhua.

Hainan has six duty-free business entities and 12 duty-free stores on the outlying islands, including six in Haikou, four in Sanya, one in Qionghai and one in Wanning, which will be opened in January 2023.

Yao added that international air transport channels for duty-free goods are increasing.

“At present, Hainan is restoring the international freight routes from Haikou to Paris, Milan, Zurich, Sydney, Singapore and Hong Kong,” he said. Hainan will steadily and orderly restore, increase or open new international routes from Haikou to Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States, he said.

The province is hoping to gradually build a competitive international route network, with duty-free products entering the island more quickly and conveniently.

The discounts, promotional measures and goodies being rolled out will benefit the duty-free shopping chains and boost local consumption in Hainan, said the Hong Kong-listed China Tourism Group Duty Free, which runs the world’s biggest duty-free complex in Sanya and accounts for about 90 per cent of the market there.