China to lift travel restrictions for citizens for first time post Covid 19

Monday, January 2, 2023

Last week, China announced that it will finally allow its citizens to travel abroad again, ANI news agency reported. Chinese authorities said that Chinese tourists will no longer need to quarantine on return home starting January 8.

Notably, China was the world’s largest outbound travel market generating over USD250 billion a year of tourist receipts in 2019, according to Reuters.

The last of the major world economies to do so, China will benefit the tourism of Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and the United States. These were among the top ten destinations for Chinese visitors before the pandemic. China is the largest source of foreign arrivals in these countries.

Testament to this is the fact that on the morning of the China announcement the travel booking website ‘trip.com’ recorded a 254 per cent increase in mainland China’s outbound flight bookings compared to a day earlier. Bookings for inbound flights surged more than four times compared with a year earlier.

Singapore was the fastest-growing of all the destinations, with flight bookings jumping six-fold on trip.com. The other four most popular countries South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan and Thailand together saw a 400 per cent increase. Long-haul flight bookings to the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia rose significantly.

The upcoming Lunar New Year, starting on January 21, will be the first time in about three years that Chinese travellers will be allowed to travel abroad.

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