China travel (writing) is back!

After three long years of restrictions, China has reinstated tourist visas. Whether this will kickstart a resurgence in travel to China remains to be seen, but at least travel media is turning its attentions to China once again. I’ve already written ‘back to China’ type articles for a few outlets including this piece for the Telegraph. It’s behind a paywall so copying it below:

So that’s that, then. Pandemic over. After three years, the last major country still harbouring Covid travel restrictions has done away with them. China is open to tourists once again. The Great Wall beckons. The Terracotta Warriors extend a welcoming hand. Tibet and Xinjiang aside, for where you would still need to obtain special permits, travellers can now go anywhere in China, even to Wuhan. Though officially, nothing of note has ever come out of that city.

Since Wednesday’s announcement, the practicalities of planning a holiday to China have reverted back to where they were before the pandemic. Which is to say irksome but comparatively straightforward. Apply for a tourist ‘L’ visa by attending an appointment at the Chinese Visa Centre in London, showing proof of return flights and hotel bookings and having your fingerprints taken. UK travellers are still expected to submit the results of a PCR test taken within 48 hours of flying, but that requirement will also likely be rescinded before long.

“China is open to tourists once again. The Great Wall beckons. The Terracotta Warriors extend a welcoming hand. ”

Various visa-free travel hacks to China, admittedly not well publicised before Covid, have been reinstated too. If you’re just passing through (i.e. you can show onward flights from China to a different country than the one you started out in), you can get 6 days of visa-free travel to cities including Beijing and Shanghai, and a 5-day visa-on-arrival in Shenzhen, especially handy if coming from Hong Kong. Cruise passengers don’t need a visa for Shanghai (provided you depart on the same boat you sailed in on), and travellers to ‘China’s Hawaii’, the holiday island of Hainan, get 30 days of visa-free travel.

But what can travellers expect when they arrive? Perhaps most notable is what they won’t encounter. Gone are the armies of hazmat-clad ‘big whites’ with their probing swabs, gone are the Covid detention hotels, the test centres, the fences, the ‘health-code’ tracking apps and all the other instruments of pandemic control that probably wouldn’t make for a relaxing getaway. Friends of mine who’ve touched down in China during the last few days report few if any people wearing masks.

There are some new things to see, naturally. Beijing now has a Universal Studios, Shanghai a swanky new art gallery, the Pudong Art Museum, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel. Perhaps the best news for travellers is the overhaul of ticketing on Chinese trains, which was rolled out just a month before the pandemic hit. International passengers can now book train journeys online using English websites like Trip.com, and simply scan their passport to board, eliminating the need to queue up at crowded stations and endure a linguistically fraught exchange at the ticket window.

Otherwise, for those already familiar with the country it should feel like business as usual. Big international hotels have weathered the storm by focusing on the healthy domestic and staycation markets. Mark Passmore, the British General Manager of swanky Shanghai hotel The Middle House, tells me about ‘Pawcations’, introduced during the pandemic to tempt in pet owners and their animals. It must have done the trick - Passmore says 2021 was the hotel’s strongest year since opening in 2018.

“Three fallow years have inflicted death by a thousand cuts on other travel services that catered to foreign visitors.”

At the boutique end of the scale, small hotels have taken more of a battering. Places like Beijing’s The Orchid, with its dozen or so homespun rooms tucked away down a hutong (the name for the capital’s old alleyways), appeal almost entirely to foreign guests, of which it has had none in three years save for the occasional expat couple on staycation. Focusing on Chinese guests provided some respite, but unpredictable Covid restrictions in the capital meant that things could be upended without warning. “A few times we had to call all of our guests and cancel their bookings,” says Canadian owner Joel Shuchat. To make matters worse, Shuchat found himself shut out of China when all visas were blocked, forcing him to run the hotel remotely via Zoom.

Three fallow years have inflicted death by a thousand cuts on other travel services that catered to foreign visitors. In 2022, Airbnb deleted all its listings in China and left the market. Domestic rivals, apps like Tujia, are Chinese only, making them about as useful to foreign tourists as Didi, the ride-hailing app that took over when Uber left China in 2016. Which is to say, unusable. Even the ticket office for the Forbidden City, which moved online to Weixin, an app, just before Covid, doesn’t accept non-Chinese bank cards or payment systems like Apple and Google. It’s such a hassle, not to mention error-prone, that travel industry friends tell me it’s advisable to hire a local tour guide for the day so they can handle it for you.

Unfortunately, there are fewer of those, now, too. Bespoke Travel Company, started in 2011 by Sarah Keenlyside, a former Time Out editor, offered high-end tour-guiding services for international visitors and the occasional A-list celeb, along with chauffeured transfers to the Great Wall and unique experiences like tai chi classes at Beijing’s Temple of Heaven. In 2022, Keenlyside was forced to put the business on hold and leave China, letting the majority of her office staff go.

“We had to pivot so many times during Covid it was exhausting”, says Keenlyside, who notes that almost all of Bespoke Travel Company’s tour guides, “the brightest and the best”, have since found other jobs, one becoming an embassy security guard. “Maybe they’ll return”, she says, “but the travel industry would need to make a blazing comeback for it to be worth yet another career change.”

And that’s the million-yuan question. Will international travel to China make a blazing comeback? What of the damage to China’s global reputation in the last three years, the Covid cover-up, the Shanghai lockdowns, the ‘no-limits friendship’ between Xi and Putin announced on the eve of the Ukraine invasion? For those who’ve never visited and only read the headlines, who could blame them for lumping China in with the likes of Russia and the DPRK as bogey destinations to be given a wide berth? Will people really yearn to visit after everything that’s happened, not to mention the frightening spectre of a potential clash over Taiwan in the future?

Definitely, says Andy Eastham of Wendy Wu Tours, the UK’s biggest tour operator to China, that marked its 25th anniversary this year. “The appetite and demand for China is still there, it’s very strong if not stronger,” claims Eastham, noting a month-on-month uptick in China inquiries since the start of the year. Customers who had China tours booked for 2020 have hung on to their bookings, he says, and will finally be jetting off this year.

Larger outfits like Wendy Wu have been better insulated from the restrictions by being able to take guests to other parts of the world while riding out the restrictions in China. And because they have their own operations company on the ground, Eastham says they’ve been able to retain staff, ready for the new wave of tours. The first of which, a ‘Wonders of China’ tour, is due to take place as early as May.

Eastham even optimistically suggests that Covid, rather than deterring people from travelling to China, might have had the opposite effect. By not being able to go anywhere while at the same time coming face to face with our own mortality, destinations like China – distant and alluring with world-famous sights – have only grown in appeal. “China is one of those iconic, bucket-list places,” says Eastham. “You see pictures of the Great Wall, but nothing compares to actually climbing on it.”