That will come as good news for the city, whose tourism industry is powered by the millions of visitors who cross the border each year.
China’s top online travel service Ctrip.com and Hong Kong beauty products retailer Bonjour, have joined hands to promote tourism on the mainland and in Hong Kong.
The two firms are launching a joint VIP card with special deals for cardholders travelling around China, Hong Kong and Macau.
Ctrip.com expects to see a 50 per cent jump this year in mainland customers travelling to Hong Kong.
In the first half of this year, more than 10 million mainland tourists visited Hong Kong, an increase of 23 per cent compared to a year ago.

Source : Konaxis

As more citizens travel depending on local weather conditions, many net users indicated the untimely updating brought inconvenience to their travelling.

Tourists Mr Fung said before Spring Festival Eve, family members wanted to travel from Hebei to Beijing, but he found at the site, “Homepage showed Beijing scenic spots was having level 4 winds”, subject to weather conditions the travel plan was suspended. For several consecutive days, Fung looked up at the site, but found weather information remained unchanged, “Small net is being updated, but an authority website like this has not been taken care of,” he said, and the site was sponsored by the municipal tourism Bureau, with strong authority, being not updated for several days brought inconvenience to families and others’ travelling.

Yesterday afternoon, reporters found at the site that homepages weather bulletin board has not been updated and its displaying time remained to be February 13, north wind level 3 or 4. Furthermore, other contents on the site’s homepage also had no changes.

In this regard, the staff members of Municipal Bureau of Tourism Information Center said, city tourism information net was its subordinate non-profit web site, as it was now the Spring Festival holiday, the website staff distribution was uneven, causing the website unattended for several days, and the site would get in touch with the staff to update the old and new information all over, providing authoritative information for tourists traveling and help.

The mainland reported more than 11.09 million inbound tourist arrivals in August, up 3.06 percent year on year, according to data from the administration.

Foreign currency income from inbound tourism was estimated at $3.466 billion in August, up 5.38 percent from a year earlier, data showed.

Those figures were compared to a year-on-year 3.05 percent decline of inbound tourist arrivals in July which stood at 10.72 million, and a 0.66 percent drop of foreign currency income to $3.325 billion.

Meanwhile, Chinese mainland tourists made about 4.65 million outbound trips in August, up 11.69 percent from a year ago. The top three destinations are Hong Kong, Macao and the Republic of Korea.

Source : Konaxis

The arrival of 1.22 million tourists was 2.3 times more than the same time last year.

The tourists brought revenues of 1.09 billion yuan ($160 million) to Tibet, 1.9 times more than the same period last year.

“Tourism in Tibet has recovered well, thanks to the stable situation and strong promotions by the tourism bureau,” Huang Lihua, general manager of China International Travel Service of the Tibet autonomous region, told China Daily.

The total visitors in the first seven months of this year was 2.71 million tourists that generated revenues of 2.29 billion yuan. Both figures more than doubled the figures for the same time last year.

Tibet’s tourism bureau did not disclose how many domestic and foreign tourists it has received respectively. But Huang said he has been impressed by the fast-growing number of domestic tourists this summer.

“We were short of tour guides for tourists from other parts of the country. We didn’t have enough vehicles for the tour groups either,” he said. So far, two new associations for tour group vehicles and tour guides were established in Tibet, he said.

Air China also increased the number of flights from Beijing to Nyingchi, an attraction in the southeastern part of Tibet, to two a day from its previous five flights a week, to satisfy the increasing number of passengers.

Guo Weihua, manager of the domestic tourism department with China Travel Service Head Office Co Ltd, said his company even had to turn down some tourists, because train tickets to Tibet are quite difficult to purchase.

Some visitors reported the lack of buses to some towns in northern Tibet because of the huge travel demand.

The attraction of Tibet to tourists is attributed to to the fact that it is considered “a sacred place in the mind of many tourists,” Guo Weihua said.

The riots in Xinjiang last month also caused some tourists to stay away from that area, and come to Tibet instead.

Source : Konaxis

383,300 mainland tourists have visited the island since it was opened to mainland tourists one year ago.

According to Janice Lai, chairwoman of Taiwan Straits Tourism Association (TSTA), more than 60 percent of mainland tour groups are on an eight-day tour that covers 1,800 km and takes in the most famous destinations, like the Sun Moon Lake and Mount Ali.

However, in the busy season of March and April, mainland tourists flock to the same scenic spots and restaurants at the same time, resulting in lower service standards.

Taiwan’s tourism authority is strengthening management to upgrade the service quality. More than 800 hotels are renovating their facilities and measures have been taken to prohibit local tour operators without enough capacity to handle mainland tour groups, Lai said.

New upcoming promotions will offer mainland tourists more in-depth and diversified tours in Taiwan to try to spread the flow of tourists, she said.

Lai said that an appraisal on whether mainland visitors could travel as individual tourists in Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu has been completed and submitted to Taiwan’s “Executive Yuan” for approval.

Source : Konaxis

The total revenue would include 35 billion U.S. dollars earned from overseas tourists, down 5 percent from last year, and 950 billion yuan from domestic travelers, up 8 percent, said a tourism report released Wednesday by the China Tourism Academy under the National Tourism Administration.

The report said China expected to see 124 million inbound trips this year, down 5 percent from a year earlier.

The report said tourism authorities had launched a series of stimulus plans to boost domestic tourism, such as promotion of rural tourism and tourism coupons, which helped buoy domestic tourism.
Domestic tours were expected to total 1.9 billion for the year, up 10 percent.

Source : Konaxis