Summer tourism feeling chill wind of latest virus outbreak

With a rising number of new COVID-19 cases reported recently, the otherwise busy summer tourism season has been brought to a screeching halt.

Since the first outbreak of the latest round of the epidemic was reported from Nanjing Lukou International Airport in Jiangsu province in late July, more than 10 provincial regions have since been affected. Some scenic sites have reduced the maximum number of daily visits or announced temporary closures, and online travel agencies are busy dealing with soaring booking cancellations covering flights, hotels and tourist attractions.

As of Friday, five regions in Yunnan, Jiangsu, Henan and Hunan provinces have been rated as high risk for the virus. Earlier this month, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism issued a notice, requiring scenic sites to further prevention and control measures, and calling for enhanced supervision over tourism operations.

In response to a burst of booking cancellations, online travel agencies have rolled out policies and employed intelligent technologies to help deal with the increasing workloads.

The number of total booking cancellations on Qunar, an online travel agency, has been four times that of normal since July 29. It was close to the level of the 2021 Spring Festival period, The Beijing News reported.

At around 8 am on Aug 4, the following day after the Civil Aviation Administration of China announced a free cancellation policy on domestic air tickets, Qunar saw applications for cancellations reach 10 times that of usual, according to Xinmin Evening News, a Shanghai-based newspaper.

An intelligent service system enables Qunar to improve service efficiency in dealing with the applications by more than four times, and more than 95 percent of requests for cancellations can be completed online in a self-service mode, the company told Xinmin Evening News.

Ctrip, a travel platform operating by Trip.com, is providing users with diverse options for inquiries and cancellations to increase efficiency.

It has opened a livestream room for service staff members on its WeChat miniprogram, replying to questions from customers in real time. It is also using high-tech means including speech recognition and natural language processing to help increase response speeds.

The entire domestic tourism industry had high hopes on this summer, considering the booming May Day and Dragon Boat Festival holidays in the first half of this year, a travel company's staff member surnamed Qiu told news portal Jiemian.

Qiu said he and his colleagues were busy working on promoting travel routes and key tourist destinations all through July, preparing an even tighter work schedule for this August than the same period of 2019.

Traditionally, summer is a profitable season for travel businesses. Financial reports from Trip.com show that the third quarter of a year, including the summer holiday, generally contributes one-third of its annual business revenue.

Yet all the efforts seemed to be aborted due to the recent outbreaks. "Thanks to the previous experience in responding to changes in the epidemic prevention and control situation, we have handled booking cancellations or changes upon when we received applications, and started to change our business direction as soon as possible," he said.

Liu said his company last year launched some startup projects, like tourism products development and online tourism as a means of diversification. "In August, we'll put more focus on this direction while promoting local tourism within a province."

Sun Xiaorong, an expert on tourism, encouraged tourism companies to turn their eyes to low-density short-haul tours, including those to the suburbs, as well as sales of featured products, China News Service reported.

Wang Degang, head of a tourism research center at Shandong University, told the news agency:"Normalized prevention and control work will continue to be a focus in the near future so industry insiders need to adapt themselves to that, ramping up efforts to improve their professional services and research and development capacities, while keeping up the prevention and control standards."