A resurgence in regional business travel, smaller meetings, a surge in leisure travel outside the big cities, tourist sites that are once again accessible, such as the Great Wall or the town of Pingyao: China is sending out positive signals to the rest of the global tourism sector, which has been affected everywhere by the containment measures linked to the coronavirus epidemic. As the first country to enter the crisis, is China showing, two months ahead of time, the shape of the recovery elsewhere in the world? If so, it will be timid, but real, with both the hotel and airline sectors operating at between 30% and 40% of capacity.
While hotels in Europe are closing one after the other, 87% of Chinese establishments surveyed by the STR analyst firm are now open. In addition, while hotel occupancy had fallen to 7.4 % during the first week of February, the number of people staying in hotels has risen to 7.4 % in the second week of February, the occupancy rate now exceeds 30%In Beijing, occupancy rose from 10% at the beginning of March to 31.8% on 28 March. In Beijing, occupancy rose from 10% at the start of March to 21.6% on 28 March; the same applies to Shanghai, where occupancy rose from 11.0 % on 1 March to 28.6 % on 28 March.
In this context, the Huazhu hotel group recently stated that it observed " a start of recovery of our hotel business since the beginning of March. We believe we reached the low point when almost 50 % of our hotels in China had to close temporarily and occupancy fell sharply to around 10 % during the Chinese New Year holidays. By 26 March 2020, 93.5 % of our hotels were back in business with an occupancy rate of 62 %, all continuing to improve. "
Christine Liu, STR's Regional Director for North Asia, believes that " these are just the first signs of a recovery that should evolve slowly. Part of the demand comes from business travel, mainly province-wide, as well as small-scale meetings. "Another clientele is travellers who are quarantined on their return to China from other countries, as well as those returning to the cities to work.
At the same time, the air transport sector was close to normal in March, operating at 42 % of capacity. According to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), average daily flights in March reached 6,533This represents an increase of 20 % on the previous month, with services mainly concentrated in Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta region. Nevertheless, to stem the influx of new cases of imported COVID-19, international flights are still limited, and even more so, according to a recent circular issued by the AACC.
Under this scheme, Chinese airlines are only allowed to operate one flight to each country per week, while foreign airlines are only allowed to operate one flight to each country per week.a single air route to China and there must be no more than one flight per week on each route to China. Another strict measure: flights arriving in or departing from the country must have a load factor of less than 75%.
Since the end of March, China has been redirecting all international flights to Beijing to airports in twelve other cities, including Shanghai, Tianjin, Nanjing and Shenyang. Passengers pass through customs and quarantine at these airports, and those who have passed quarantine inspection can fly to Beijing.
