Trip.Biz on China: 'Majority of the recovery is coming from domestic travel'

Trip.Biz director of global strategy Sherwin Dai, speaking at the CTC Singapore Corporate Travel Summit, stated (27-Jun-2023) following the lifting of COVID Zero policies by China's Government in late 2022 "by the end of December, basically everybody in China got COVID, so everyone stopped travelling for a month", followed by a recovery in travel in Jan-2023 and a "major rebound" from Feb-2023. Mr Dai said based on travel numbers in China thus far in 2023, "we are projecting a 60% year-on-year increase for 2023, which would push us to around 85%-90% of 2019 levels". He noted "the majority of the recovery is coming from domestic travel", with international travel in China "still only at around 30%-40% of where it was in 2019". Mr Dai said travel in China may recover to 100% of 2019 levels by mid 2024, but more likely this will occur towards the end of 2024.