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.
