Hong Kong, the city where east and west meet, has a plethora of shopping, eating, elements restaurants, and entertainment activities. Hong Kong hospitality and tourism are one of the city’s four-pillar sectors, and the city has extensive expertise in meeting worldwide standards when it comes to servicing hotel guests, cruise passengers, and conference attendees. Hong Kong hospitality is boosting in the world of globalization, and the city’s well-traveled local population offers exciting potential for travel service providers that ensure its attractiveness as a leisure and business travel destination.
- Hong Kong is regarded for having some of the world’s finest hotels and element restaurants, and the tremendous expansion of business and leisure travel in Asia has raised the demand for lodging.
- Hong Kong is one of the world’s most visited cities and an important tourist destination in Asia. In the years preceding 2019, inbound tourism contributed nearly 3.5 percent to Hong Kong’s GDP and produced approximately 220,000 directly linked employment.
- The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the tourism industry, with monthly arrivals dropping by 96 to 99 percent year on year since February 2020. Because limitations may only be progressively relaxed and demand for overseas travel remains low, the Hong Kong tourism sector is unlikely to revive until 2022.
- With 29 million overnight tourists and 65 million overall arrivals, Hong Kong was the world’s biggest tourist city destination in 2018.
- Over the previous two decades, the city has profited immensely from a rising influx of visitors from mainland China, accounting for more than 75 percent of overall arrivals in recent years. In comparison, visitor numbers from other parts of the world have remained rather stable over the previous decade. Because Chinese travelers from the mainland spend more money during their stay in Hong Kong, the tourism and hotel industries rely heavily on revenue from mainland Chinese visitors.
- The number of hotels in Hong Kong nearly quadrupled between 2010 and 2020, owing to growth in overnight visits, while available hotel rooms climbed by more than 40%.
- The Hong Kong demonstrations in 2019 had already had a negative impact on the occupancy rate of available rooms, and reservations nearly collapsed in February 2020 owing to the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Aside from giving subsidies, the Hong Kong administration launched a “vacation at home” campaign, encouraging Hong Kong people to book hotel rooms and take advantage of tourist attractions. On a global scale, the emphasis is on resuming cross-border tourism with specific areas by renegotiating travel restrictions.
However, given the current state of the pandemic, with vaccinations still ongoing and dangerous virus variants spreading quickly, it is unlikely that travel restrictions – including those with the mainland – will be lifted on a larger scale any time soon, putting Hong Kong’s hotel industry in jeopardy and further delaying economic recovery.