B.C. to miss out the revival of Chinese tourism

 Thursday, August 24, 2023 

For B.C. tour operators and travel agents, building up post-pandemic business was quite a challenging task, serving the Chinese market.

Beijing excluded Canada just a week earlier from its list of approved countries for group tours, even though it raised restrictions in travel to Australia, U.S., Japan and South Korea, among many other countries.

The owner of Happy Times Travel, Glynnis Chan, said that they’ve undergone bad experiences for more than three years already. The tourism sector of B.C. has gone through a considerable spring back with the arrival of US and Mexico visitors along with other destinations like India.

Chinese visitation, with no all-powerful approved destination status for group tours, dropped by 70 per cent compared to the levels of pre- pandemic levels.

Chan’s expectation was that lifting the restrictions of pandemic-era travel of China would assist the country in rebuilding what had turned out to be the second-largest tourism market after the U.S. However, now it’s all disappeared, Chan added.

Due to the split created by accusations of Chinese interference in Canadian politics, Canada was dropped off the list of 78 countries actually.

Also, the Chinese embassy based in Ottawa raised issues about uncontrolled and prejudiced anti-Asian incidents in Canada.

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