The past Qingming Festival, a traditional Chinese festival during which people pay tribute to the dead and worship their ancestors, has seen another surge of Chinese travelers going to visa-friendly destinations from Southeast Asia to Africa, as some new favorable immigration policies for Chinese tourists started to take effect.
Those new rules have significantly facilitated Chinese visitors’ overseas travel and more people-to-people exchanges. Experts believe that China’s ongoing tourism trend might indicate a profitable outlook for local and global tourism.
Data from the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) showed that flight passenger services between China and Singapore have recovered to pre-COVID-19 level. Flight tickets booked for the Qingming Festival between the Chinese mainland and Singapore has exceeded the same period in 2019, up by 50 percent, with a 15 percent fare increase, according to Flight Master, a leading travel data processor.
Even in Tanzania, to which direct flights from the Chinese mainland take 12 hours, Chinese tourists showed an obvious increase, Pan Lei from “Fashion Tourism,” the first Chinese tourist company in Tanzania, told Xinhua.
“Tanzania has one of the richest wildlife resources in the world and the Great Migration in the Serengeti plains. It is also home to Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa, and Zanzibar, the pearl of the Indian Ocean,” he said.
“The number of Chinese tourists visiting Tanzania has increased by 32.4 percent from 33,541 in 2019 to 44,438 in 2023,” said Damas Mfugale, director general of the Tanzania Tourism Board.
In the first three months, Thailand has welcomed 1.75 million visitors from China, the largest source of tourists to the Southeast Asian country, according to data from the Thai Ministry of Tourism and Sports.
The rising number of inbound tourists is supported by the mutual visa-free agreement between Thailand and China, which helps boost travel between the two countries, the ministry said in a statement.
China has signed visa free travel rule with many countries in the regions including Malaysia.
