Smaller cities of China sending more tourists to overseas

Updated: 2016-08-08 19:56

By SU ZHOU(chinadaily.com.cn)

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A recent report showed that smaller cities from the Chinese mainland are sending more tourists to overseas tourism destinations. And they have spent even more than those from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

China Tourism Academy and Ctrip, one of China's leading online service providers, jointly released the outbound tourism report for the first half year of 2016 on Monday.

From January to June, more than 59 million visits were paid by Chinese mainland tourists to overseas tourism destinations, an increase of 4.3 percent year-on-year. It meant that the number of Chinese outbound tourists equals the entire Italian population.

Among mainland outbound travelers, visits paid by those from smaller cities grew at a rapid rate, including Changsha of Hunan province, Shenzhen of Guangdong province, Chongqing, Chengdu of Sichuan province, Wuhan of Hubei province, Kunming of Yunnan province, Fuzhou of Fujian province, Xi'an of Shaanxi province, Nanjing of Jiangsu province and Hangzhou of Zhejiang province.

And they've been spending big during their overseas trips. On the top list of tourism expenditure, Suzhou from Jiangsu province ranked the top. The average expenditure of Suzhou's outbound tourists reached 6,125 yuan.

Wenzhou of Zhejiang and Kunming of Yunnan province came next.

Beijing ranked only 8th on the top 10 list with average spending reaching 5,568 yuan.

The report said that despite the fact that Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou still have the majority of outbound travelers, new emerging smaller cities are contributing more to the booming outbound tourism industry.

"China has became the largest source country of many countries' inbound tourism market, such as Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Russia and the United Kingdom," said the report. "However, those have passport only account less than five percent of China's total population. The outbound tourism industry in China still has a lot of space of further development."

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