Beijing registers strong recovery in Spring Festival tourist visits

BEIJING -- Tourists are swarming back to Beijing's major attractions, with the visitor numbers during the first three days of the Spring Festival holiday bouncing back to 91 percent of the 2019 level despite stringent anti-epidemic measures in place.

The city's 147 key tourist spots saw about 2.76 million visits between Feb 11 and 13, with Wangfujing shopping street topping the chart with 360,000 tourist arrivals, said the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism.

Revenues of these spots increased 1.6 times from the same period in 2019, according to the bureau.

Other popular destinations in terms of visitor numbers include Qianmen Street, located near Tian'anmen Square; a shopping plaza in the suburban Changping District; and the Nanluoguxiang Lane, known for its well-preserved quadrangle courtyards.

Beijing registered a resurgence in COVID-19 cases between December and January. The city has called on its scenic spots to cap tourist capacity to 50 percent during the seven-day holiday and to promote advance booking and off-peak travels in a bid to mitigate risks of infection.

Many of the city's scenic spots were closed during the otherwise jam-packed Spring Festival holiday in 2020 to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.