Biggest spenders aren’t returning any time soon

On Jeju Island in South Korea, the markets have gone dark. In Bangkok, bored hawkers wait around for customers who never come. In the Indonesian island of Bali, tour guides have been laid off. In Paris and Rome, the long lines of people with selfie sticks and sun hats are a distant memory.

This was supposed to be the year travel came back. In Europe and Asia, many countries reopened their airports and welcomed tourists. But they are confronting a new reality: Variants such as omicron are causing global panic, leading governments to shut borders again, and their biggest spenders — Chinese tourists — aren’t returning any time soon.

As part of its effort to maintain a zero-COVID-19 approach, China has announced that international flights would be kept at 2.2 percent of pre-COVID-19 levels during the winter. Since August, it has almost entirely stopped issuing new passports, and it has imposed a 14-day quarantine for all arrivals. Returning to China also requires mountains of paperwork and multiple COVID-19 tests.

Many people there have decided to just stay put.

No country has been more crucial to global travel in the past decade than China. Chinese tourists spent roughly $260 billion in 2019, exceeding all other nationalities. Their prolonged absence would mean travel revenues are unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels soon. Analysts say it could take up to two years before China fully reopens.

Shopping malls have emptied out. Restaurants have shut down. Hotels are deserted.

The downturn is particularly affecting North and Southeast Asia. China is the No. 1 source of tourism in Asia for several large cities, according to Nihat Ercan, head of investment sales for the Asia Pacific at JLL Hotels & Hospitality, an adviser to the hospitality industry.

The recent discovery of omicron has prompted countries to reimpose travel restrictions or bar travelers altogether. It’s another blow to an industry that, though still reeling from the lack of Chinese tourists, was just starting to recover.

In Bangkok’s Or Tor Kor fruit market, where masses of Chinese tourists would once gather around tables eating durian, business has ground to a halt. Phakamon Thadawatthanachok, a durian seller, said she used to keep 300 to 400 kilograms of the spiky fruit in stock and had to resupply them three to four times a week to keep up with the demand. Now, she had to take a loan just to make ends meet.

“The loss of income is immeasurable,” she said. “At the moment, we are only holding onto the hope that it will get better someday.”

In Vietnam, the pandemic has caused over 95 percent of tourism businesses to close or suspend operations, according to the government.

Before the pandemic, Chinese visitors flocked to the beach towns of Da Nang and Nha Trang, accounting for around 32 percent of the total number of foreign tourists into the country.

“The service industry in this city has died,” said Truong Thiet Vu, director of a travel company in Nha Trang that is now shut down.

On Bali, many tourist agencies have either sold their vehicles or have had them confiscated by their leasing companies, according to Franky Budidarman, owner of one of two major travel agencies on the island that caters to Chinese tourists.

Budidarman said he had to cut the salaries of his office workers by half and pivoted to running a food delivery service and a cafe. “I’m grateful that I have survived for two years now,” he said. “I sometimes wonder how I could have done this.”

For the places that catered to Chinese tourists who traveled in group packages, the loss has been especially stark. On Jeju Island, popular among Chinese visitors because they could enter without visas, the number of tourists arriving from China dropped more than 90 percent to 103,000 in 2020 from more than 1 million in 2019. From January to September of this year, that number was only about 5,000.

As many as half of the dutyfree shops catering to Chinese tourists in Jeju have closed, according to Hong Sukkyoun, a spokesperson for the Jeju Tourism Association.

At the Big Market Shopping Center, which used to sell island specialties like chocolate and crafts, all but three of 12 employees have been laid off, said An Younghoon, 33, who was among those who became jobless in July.

“When the virus began spreading, we all started counting our days down,” he said. “We knew there wasn’t going to be any business soon.”

Chinese visitors are less common in Europe, but they had emerged as an increasingly important market in recent years.