Tourism cloud has silver lining
No tiresome wait for hugs and kisses from Mickey and Minnie Mouse. No queue at all for Hyperspace Mountain, where thrillseekers are so scarce that Star Wars’ Admiral Ackbar speaks to himself in the dark.
Tinker Bell gazes out over rows of empty seats on the train to Hong Kong Disneyland, which was far busier before tourists were scared off by antigovernment protests shaking the city.
That’s tough for local businesses, but great for Disney fans like Yunice Tsui and her sevenand four-year-old daughters. With an annual pass to the park she’s already visited nine times, Tsui is better placed than most to size up the body blow to Hong Kong visitor numbers from the often violent demonstrations, now in their fifth month.
‘‘Before June, you’d generally queue for more than 30 minutes for each ride. For the last few times since July . . . it’s about a five- to six-minute wait,’’ she said.
‘‘There are certainly less people, I would say 60 per cent less. Kids are very happy because after a ride, they can go queue up for another one.’’
The impact of the protests on tourism is verging on catastrophic for Hong Kong, one of the world’s great destinations and geared up to receive 65 million visitors a year.
On Victoria Peak, restaurants with knockout night-time views of the city’s neon-lit skyscrapers stand empty. The snaking lines of tourists for the 19th-century tram to the top are now just a memory.
The Dragon Boat Carnival in June, when protests started: cancelled. A Wine & Dine Festival scheduled for the end of this month: scrapped, too.
Hong Kong received 2.3 million fewer visitors in August compared with a year earlier, largely trips that people from elsewhere in China are no longer making to the semiautonomous Chinese territory. September visitor numbers are unlikely to be any better, given recent protest-related violence and chaos.
‘‘It’s deserted,’’ said Dyutimoy Chakraborty, who runs the Gordon Ramsay Bread Street Kitchen & Bar opposite the Peak Tram. The tram now closes at 10pm instead of midnight, because of ‘‘potential demonstrations and protests in the nearby area’’.
The eatery had lost nearly half of its weekday business, he added.
But even when the protests have involved hundreds of thousands of people, they’ve generally been confined to a few areas.
And the tourists who come anyway are finding bargainbasement hotel rates, two-forone deals, easy late checkouts and other sweeteners.
Visiting from Taiwan, where he works as a teacher, South African Winand Koch paid the equivalent of just NZ$102 a night for a hotel room which was nearly quadruple that rate a few months back.
Even some Hong Kong residents are enjoying a respite from the usual floods of visitors, mainly from mainland China.
Up on the Peak, Hong Kongborn Isaac Mercado, a 26-yearold banking analyst, was luxuriating in the unusual emptiness. ‘‘I get the chance to explore more a bit on my own, and not be crammed with loads of tourists,’’ he said.