Welcome Back, Low-Spending Tourists

Chinese budget tour groups were unpopular before Covid. Now nations covet their cash

- James E. Ellis

Before the pandemic, travel agent Zhao Ling spent much of her time helping Chinese clients visit Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia cheaply. Based in the city of Deyang in Sichuan province, she organized inexpensive package tours that shepherded busloads of travelers through affiliated stores and restaurants—and steered customers away from other, locally owned businesses. Deriding the all-inclusive packages as so-called zero-dollar tourism because much of the money—lots of it spent before visitors left China—didn’t filter throughout the local economies, critics blamed agents like Zhao for overcrowding beaches, temples, and other popular sites, from Phuket’s boisterous Patong entertainment district to Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple complex.

“Of course they don’t like us,” Zhao says. “No one does.”

Chinese in recent years had become a major driver of the tourism industry globally, making 155 million trips outside the mainland in 2019, according to Ministry of Culture and Tourism data. The country’s travelers accounted for 16% of global tourism spending that year, double that of 2010, according to Natixis SA. Many of them traveled on packages, which helped inexperienced Chinese tourists avoid language problems and logistics challenges. Still, criticism had been growing that the increasing dependence on Chinese visitors wasn’t worth the disruptions that the low-spending throngs wrought. That simmering debate cooled when China shut its borders in 2020 to halt Covid-19’s spread, a move that left tourism businesses shuttered across Asia and many hospitality workers unemployed.