Clicking off Poverty
How Internet Plus tourism has spread rural Tibet’s wings By Li Nan
Phuntsok, a 70-year-old family inn owner in Nyingchi City, southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, is remarkably web savvy. On his business card, there is a QR code for tourists to scan to see the virtual reality (VR) panorama of his guesthouse in Tashi Gang Village, Lhulang Town.
“Many tourists decide to stay at my inn when they see the VR presentation,” he said proudly. The veteran-turned-entrepreneur was the first Tibetan to offer accommodations to tourists in Lhulang starting in 1998.
Along with VR, Phuntsok also promotes his guesthouse on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, and WeChat, China’s most popular messaging app; and through live streaming. He has more than 1,780 contacts on his WeChat account, most of whom were previous guests. Whenever a newcomer asks him about the specific location of the inn, the elderly man expertly shares his position through his cellphone, guiding guests with the help of cyber maps.
Things were different when Phuntsok first started his business. Having not attended school, he had no idea how to use the Internet to promote his homestay. But since 2016, with the help of the local government, free Wi-Fi has been available in rural Nyingchi. A specialized online platform for promoting the city’s tourism was also established in the same year and a free training course on how to use online marketing was offered to family hotel owners. This was grist to the mill for Phuntsok, who ran with these promotional tools.
Now, Phuntsok’s guesthouse has become one of the most popular inns in Nyingchi. Celebrities and backpackers queue for a room in advance of the peak season. In 2017, he received nearly 7,000 guests, a surge of 133 percent in two years, with a yearly income of 350,000 yuan ($55,840).
Internet Plus tourism
“I could never enjoy my good life today without the good policies,” Phuntsok said, referring to the local government’s commitment in recent years to pulling herdsmen and farmers out of poverty with Internet Plus tourism.
Tibet aims to become an international tourist destination and an all-in-one tourism demonstration zone in China. In May 2015, it rolled out a plan to build 20 distinctive towns with complete Internet infrastructure and digital public service platforms, including Phuntsok’s hometown of Lhulang.
Located along National Highway 318, Lhulang town is known as China’s most beautiful passage linking Sichuan Province and Tibet and has long been a tourist stop. Local residents have always offered accommodations or sold native products to tourists. But there was never a specialized online platform to connect tourists with guesthouse owners.
“On the one hand, many tourists wanted to experience the traditional rural Tibetan lifestyle, but few knew where to go before 2016. On the other hand, farmers-turnedhomestay managers knew little about marketing and promotion,” Tanzin Samdrup, head of the Nyingchi Tourism Development Commission (NTDC) told Beijing Review.
The changes began in 2016, when the town was renovated with 3.8 billion yuan ($601 million) of investment from China’s southern Guangdong Province. A paved road network was built to make scattered villages more connected and accessible. Public infrastructure, such as a water supply station, a garbage transfer station and a sewage treatment plant were erected. Villages were cleaned up and old guesthouses renovated. Up to 90 percent of the town was covered by a mobile communication network. The once simple town was transformed into an international tourist destination with a traditional Tibetan atmosphere.
Since its trial run in 2016, Lhulang town has received over 300,000 tourists, creating many great business opportunities and gen-