The other side of the coin: inbound tourism to China falling short of five-year plan

Despite this year’s stock market turbulence and Yuan devaluation, growth in Chinese outbound tourism is showing no signs of slowing down – on the contrary, Chinese tourists are increasingly willing to go abroad, and long-haul destinations are more popular than ever. However, the situation is looking quite different in China, where inbound tourism is falling short of the goals.

Following three years of decline in visits by overseas tourists (including tourists coming from Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) – it is looking unlikely that inbound tourism to China will reach the goal set in the 12th Five-Year Plan. The Five-Year plan for 2011-2015 targets annual growth rate of inbound overseas tourists of 4.5 percent, which makes the target 153 million visitors by 2015. However, in 2014, 128.5 million overseas visitors arrived in China, so reaching the overall goal for the Five-Year Plan would require a jump in arrivals in 2015 of approximately 19 percent. For the first 9 months of 2015, an increase of 4.4 percent over the same period in 2014 was observed, making it unlikely that the overall number for 2015 will reach the target.

Gao Tianming, a researcher at the Tourism Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences told China Daily that “it will be impossible to achieve the overall goal by the end of this year”.

Dai Bin, director of the China Tourism Academy, was more optimistic and told China Daily that the developments in inbound tourism so far this year has shown that “the downward trend has been contained”.

Source: China Daily

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