Foreign guests snap up hotel rooms around exhibition site

Hotels near to the National Exhibition and Convention Center in Shanghai - the venue for the China International Import Expo from Nov 5 to 10 - have received an unprecedented volume of bookings from overseas visitors headed to the event.

Data provided by Ctrip, the online Chinese travel agency, show that the number of bookings from Nov 4 to 10 made on its platform by overseas visitors surged by a record 100 percent on a month-on-month basis.

More than 3,000 enterprises from over 130 countries have signed up for the CIIE, the first Chinese expo to focus exclusively on imported goods and services.

Visitors from Australia account for the majority of the hotel bookings, followed by those from Japan, the United States, South Korea and New Zealand, according to the data from Ctrip.

"As most of these participants are from the business and political sectors, they have relatively higher requirements with regard to accommodation conditions," says Du Liangliang, general manager of Ctrip's domestic hotel business.

"More than 90 percent of them have reserved rooms at three-star hotels and above, and 65 percent of them have booked four- and five-star hotels."

Starting on Nov 4, all hotels located within 5 kilometers of the convention center will be fully occupied, Du adds.

According to the Shanghai Tourism Administration, more than 1,700 hotels of three-star level or higher will provide nearly 280,000 rooms to the expo participants. The bureau has also teamed up with the tourism administrator in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, to provide 8,860 rooms in 49 hotels in the city as backup for CIIE visitors.

By the end of July, all 760 rooms in the Wisdom Rose Hotel in eastern Shanghai, which opened in March, were booked by visitors planning to attend the CIIE, says Jin Wenxin, general manager of the hotel.

According to Ctrip, the majority of overseas visitors to the CIIE have also planned trips to neighboring cities. For instance, the number of high-speed train tickets from Nov 4 to 11 bought by overseas consumers has jumped by nearly 50 percent year-on-year, with the most popular destinations being Hangzhou in Zhejiang province as well as Suzhou, Nanjing and Wuxi in Jiangsu.

It appears that many Chinese have also made travel plans during the start of the expo period. On Oct 11, the Shanghai government said the city's residents would get a holiday from Nov 4 to 6 as part of measures to ease traffic conditions and ensure the smooth running of the event. However, residents will instead have to work on Nov 3 and 11.

Ctrip says the search for hotels in neighboring cities spiked by 200 percent within an hour of the holiday announcement.

For three days, the number of reservations made for hotels in neighboring cities increased by around 50 percent from the previous month, with bookings for Suzhou and Hangzhou rising the most significantly, at 62 percent and 55 percent respectively.

shijing@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 11/02/2018 page8)