TRAVEL & HOSPITALITY
THE FUTURE 100
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China’s outbound travel market was once the world’s biggest, peaking at 169 million trips in 2019. Chinese tourists were so ubiquitous that hotels in Hawaii hired Mandarin speakers and London’s Marylebone train station debuted
platform announcements in Mandarin. Then COVID-19 hit and national borders clanged shut. But China’s travel economy hasn’t exactly stalled. It’s just turned more domestic—for now.
Despite periodic local lockdowns, the total number of domestic trips taken
between January and September 2021 rose 39% year-on-year to 2.69 billion trips, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism reported.
Boosting China’s travel economy China’s travel industry gears up for a post-pandemic future with new mega-airports, theme parks, and expanded duty-free shopping.
Three things China is doing to boost its travel economy: Premiumizing airports
Beijing’s starfish-shaped Daxing International Airport, the capital’s second
international flight hub, opened in September 2019. Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, it cost over $11 billion, features a central courtyard inspired by
traditional Chinese architecture and skylights for intuitive navigation, and is expected to eventually serve over 100 million passengers a year, rivaling Hartsfield-Atlanta International Airport, the world’s busiest.
In China’s southwest, Chengdu Tianfu International Airport opened in
June 2021, with capacity of 60 million passengers a year, offering a second international gateway to Sichuan province’s giant pandas and signature spicy cuisine.
Enhancing duty-free shopping
Unable to fly to Paris, New York or Milan to buy the latest designer bag, luxury shoppers are instead flying to the duty-free zone of Hainan island, known as China’s Hawaii.
