China's tourism income ended at 60% pre-Covid classes this weekend

September 14, 2022-China’s tourism sector ended yet one more public holiday with revenue well below what it was before the pandemic.

National tourism revenue for the three-day Mid-Autumn Festival reached 28.68 billion yuan, just 60.6% of the 2019 pre-pandemic levels, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism stated on Monday. The figure also marked a 22.8% decline from the previous year.

The ministry said that tourist trips of 73.4 million were nearly 17% below last year’s figure and had reversed to 72.6% of 2019 levels.

The tourism figures dropped more during the last public holiday in early June, pointed out Ting Lu, an old China economist at Nomura.

“The worsening business activity was mainly due to the tightened Covid control measures, as people hold been advised to stay local and avoid unnecessary trips in the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holiday,” he said in a report on Monday. China’s coming public holiday will be in October.

Chinese tourism has slipped since the pandemic hit in early 2020. According to the tourism ministry, trained tourism income for all of last year was about half of what it was in 2019.

This year, figures for the first six months indicated a drop of about 28% from the same period in 2021. And since Shanghai’s two-month lockdown ended in June, China has battled outbreaks across the country, including on the resort island of Hainan.

This year’s Mid-Autumn Festival officially landed, with the public holiday running through Monday.

Even if people didn’t travel far, they were not tilted on going to movie theaters. The long-weekend box office is coming at 370 million yuan ($53.44 million), the lowest since 2017, according to movie ticketing site Maoyan.

The data showed that the number of film cinema visits was the lowest since 2013, despite triple the number of movie showings.