Inbound tourism calls for better coordination

While hard barriers like visas continue to fall, shortcomings in the visitor experience are becoming more apparent.

A 2025-26 tourism development report published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and its tourism research center identified payment services, information access and transportation as key areas requiring further improvement.

The most significant of these challenges is what some experts describe as a "reverse digital divide".

China's digital ecosystem is among the world's most advanced, but many services were designed primarily around domestic users.

Shao Zhiqing, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, China's top advisory body, said the country's digital identity infrastructure was originally built around a single national identification system and has yet to fully accommodate multiple forms of foreign documentation.

From purchasing high-speed rail tickets to reserving attractions, using shared bicycles or registering at hotels, many travel services increasingly rely on mobile applications that assume users possess Chinese identification credentials, said Shao, who is also chairman of the Shanghai Committee of China Zhi Gong Party.

"The issue is not whether digital services exist, but whether international visitors can access them as easily as domestic users," Shao said.

Progress is being made. In May, Tencent's cross-border platform Ten-Pay Global and US fintech firm PayPal announced a payment-interoperability agreement, allowing international PayPal users to make purchases directly across Weixin Pay's vast merchant network in China.

Analysts described the move as an important step toward addressing one of the most common frustrations among foreign visitors: difficulty navigating China's highly digitalized payment ecosystem.

Beyond digital services, foreign tourists frequently cite inconsistent English-language signage, varying hotel reception practices and uneven service quality across destinations.

Yao Xin, secretary-general of the commercial sub-council of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, said many recurring problems arise because China lacks a unified service-standard framework covering the entire visitor journey.

Multilingual signage, ticketing systems, accommodation procedures and tourism information services are often managed by different authorities and implemented unevenly across regions, he said.

"Many places have services, but not standards," Yao said.

Shanghai has emerged as one example of how greater coordination can improve the visitor experience. According to Wang Zhihua, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism, the city has coordinated 15 government departments to implement more than 60 measures covering customs clearance, transportation, accommodation, payments and tax refunds.

The city received 9.36 million inbound visitors in 2025, up 39 percent year-on-year, while tourism foreign-exchange revenue rose 33 percent to $14.8 billion, both hitting record highs.

For many economists, inbound tourism has become a test of China's broader institutional opening-up.

Dai Bin, president of the China Tourism Academy, argues that fragmented governance remains one of the biggest constraints.

He said inbound tourism involves the immigration authorities, transport agencies, telecommunications providers, financial institutions, tourism regulators and local governments, yet coordination among them often remains incomplete.

As a result, foreign visitors can still encounter what Dai describes as a service system with "multiple faces", where individual segments improve, but the overall experience remains inconsistent.

Yang Ruilong, a professor at Renmin University of China, said addressing these problems requires more than technical upgrades.

China ultimately needs a more open service framework capable of accommodating overseas passports, international payment methods and multilingual digital services, he said.

"The deeper issue is a transition from systems designed around administrative convenience to systems designed around user experience," Yang said.

That transition may prove critical if China hopes to unlock the full economic potential of inbound tourism.

Liang estimates that if China can triple inbound visitor numbers and increase per-capita spending by 60 percent to 70 percent over the coming years, the sector could generate hundreds of billions of dollars in additional foreign-exchange earnings.

China's inbound tourism revenue currently accounts for less than 1 percent of GDP, well below levels seen in major tourism economies such as France and Thailand, suggesting substantial room for growth, he said.

lijing2009@chinadaily.com.cn