A lone tourist walks into the sea at Boracay in the Philippines. Southeast Asia's heavy reliance on Chinese tourists means the disruptions caused by China’s Covid Zero policy are dealing a huge economic blow.
Photographer: Geric Cruz/BloombergChina’s Covid Stance Has Created a $280 Billion Black Hole for Global Tourism
The country's sealed borders mean travel hotspots are reopening without one of their biggest sources of tourists.
After two long years, piazzas and shopping boutiques across Europe are again welcoming tourists, with one big difference: Chinese travelers — some of the biggest spenders before the pandemic — are nowhere to be seen. It’s the same in Southeast Asia, where tourism-dependent economies are throwing open their doors, but the white-sand beaches of the Philippines and night markets of northern Thailand are all but deserted.
China’s borders remain effectively sealed as the country continues to pursue a zero-tolerance approach to a virus that other parts of the world have accepted as endemic. For the country’s 1.4 billion people, international travel is basically off the table with weeks-long hotel quarantines on return and flight options severely limited. Fear of Covid, which is stamped out aggressively when it flares in China, is also a factor.
For the world’s tourist hotspots, that’s a problem. Chinese travelers spent $277 billion overseas in 2018 and another $255 billion in 2019, accounting for almost 20% of all international tourism spending, data from the United Nations’ World Tourism Organization show. As the virus emerged in 2020 — with the first cases in the central Chinese city of Wuhan — their expenditure slumped to $130.5 billion, most of which would have come in the months before March, when much of the world went into lockdown.