The Recovery of Domestic Tourism in China: Practices from a Typical Tourism City Hangzhou

Abstract

It was estimated that 450 million people would take vacations during the Chinese Spring Festival in early 2020, yet the outbreak of the pandemic resulted in a sudden brake of travel business. This caused an unparalleled damage to the industry for tourism cities in China. Among those cities, Hangzhou was the first to activate the First Level Public Health Emergency Response, indicating an immediate lockdown. However, within one month, the city started to reopen its public facilities, parks and gardens for residents. From then, the city has witnessed a well-controlled pandemic and steady recovery of tourism. Therefore, the author intends to explore (1) what contributes to the tourism recovery in Hangzhou; (2) how the policy was implemented efficiently and (3) the casual relations between the safe destination image and the recovery of tourism industry. From a longitudinal perspective, the research adopted qualitative methods to collect data from policy documents, interviews and auto-ethnographic reflections. Thematic analysis indicates that effective control of the pandemic, early application of tracing app, seamless linkage between administrative levels and the cooperation of local residents are important to create a positive and safe destination image; traditional values and the authority of the government are equally important for implementing measures and policies successfully; more importantly, the safe image of a destination is considered as the most important reason for Chinese to make a travel decision. The research will contribute to destination management under crisis and exemplify the possibility to build the destination resilience with those effective.practices.

Citation

Qiao, G. and Ryan, C. (2022), "The Recovery of Domestic Tourism in China: Practices from a Typical Tourism City Hangzhou", Mohanty, P., Sharma, A., Kennell, J. and Hassan, A. (Ed.) The Emerald Handbook of Destination Recovery in Tourism and Hospitality, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 105-124. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80262-073-320221007