By Xiao Wu, EDITOR
Travelers at the airport
On July 8, 2018, Chongqing Daily and Ctrip Group jointly released Big Data Report on Chongqing Tourism in the First Half of 2018 (Report for short).
The Report is prepared based on a big data sample of 300,000,000 Ctrip online users’ booking of tourism products including solo tours, group tour, customer-designed tour, etc. and offline tour sign-up in more than 7000 Ctrip stores. The statistics are from Chongqing Daily Group Big Data Research Institute.
According to the Report, the number of domestic and foreign tourists accumulated from January to June of 2018 has reached more than 260 million, achieving an income of more than RMB 190 billion (about USD 27.84 billion) for the tourism industry, with a year-on-year increase of 12.73% and 34.48%, respectively.
The domestic tourists coming to Chongqing are mainly from Chongqing’s neighboring provinces and developed cities including Beijing and Shanghai, with top 5 tourist source provinces being: Sichuan, Guangdong, Guizhou, Hubei, Zhejiang, and top tourist source cities being: Chengdu, Shanghai, Guiyang, Xi’an, Beijing, Nanjing, Kunming, Wuhan, Guangzhou, etc.
“Expanding the scale of domestic tourist source market, enhancing the promotion and marketing of tourism of second and third-tier cities and reaching nationwide tourists are the main topics of Chongqing tourism development in the domestic market.” said the expert from Chongqing Daily Group Big Data Research Institute.
According to the Report, in the first half of 2018, the percentage of foreign tourists directly arriving in Chongqing from abroad is 62% while that of foreign tourists arriving in Chongqing from other cities of China is 38%. In terms of tourist source countries, the US is the biggest, and others are Japan, France, Germany, Russia, Singapore, Australia, Thailand, etc.
Chongqing has been actively involved in the Belt and Road Initiatives, China Railway Express to Europe, China-Singapore (Chongqing) Demonstration Initiative on Strategic Connectivity, etc. which not only increases the influence in trade but also attracts more and more foreign tourists to Chongqing.
Source: Xinhuanet