Crossing borders easily crucial for tourism trade
China and Kazakhstan showed their willingness to work together on making it easier to cross borders to enable more tourist visits, tourism administration officials said.
Li Shihong, deputy director of the China National Tourism Administration, said that the two countries should improve transportation connections with each other, and on that basis, make it convenient for tourists from the two countries to enter and exit.
“We also hope that the two countries will strengthen cooperation in building tourism infrastructure, developing tourism markets and training people working in the tourism industry, so that a safe, com- fortable environment can be created for tourists from both countries,” he said.
Li made the remarks on Monday at the China-Ka- zakhstan Forum on Tourism Cooperation in Beijing, an event in the framework of the Tourism Year of China in Kazakhstan to boost mutual visits. The opening ceremony of the tourism year was held in April in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan.
According to Dai Bin, director of the China Tourism Academy, 73,400 tourists from Kazakhstan visited China from January to April, a year-onyear rise of 16.6 percent, which he described as encouraging. However, last year, 225,400 tourists from the Central Asian country visited China, a 6.7 percent drop from 2015.
On the other hand, he said, while the number of Chinese tourists visiting Kazakhstan last year increased by 3.4 percent to 257,900, the figure for the first four months of the year decreased by almost 10 percentage points compared with a year earlier.
Dai said the fluctuation may result from restrictions due to infrastructure, public services and the convenience of entry. For example, visas to Kazakhstan are still not easy to obtain, particularly for individual tourists, although the country began to issue group travel visas to Chinese tourists last July.
“More steps should be taken to ensure a steady increase of tourists from and to each other,” Dai said.
Askar Batalov, Kazakhstan’s vice-minister of culture and sport, said at the forum that China is an important strategic partner for Kazakhstan and also a major resource for outbound tourists. Kazakhstan is working and will continue to work to attract more tourists from China, taking measures that include making visas easy to obtain.