China’s travel economy is slowly coming back. Here’s where it stands.

HONG KONG – Since China reopened its borders in 2023 after three years of Covid-19 isolation, domestic travel has boomed and high-speed rail has become increasingly popular. But international travel in and out of the country is lagging, and flight capacity is still only two-thirds of pre-pandemic levels.

The economy is high. Before the pandemic, Chinese travelers were the world’s biggest spenders, accounting for 20 percent of global tourism spending, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization.

Last year, Chinese authorities tried to stimulate more inbound travel. Among the changes: China waived travel visas or agreed to extend the length of visa-free travel for visitors from eight countries, including Germany and France.

The main factor curbing international travel by the Chinese it will continue to be China’s economy. Growth has picked up since the pandemic, but the weight of a severe real estate slump has weighed on consumer spending and confidence in China. And global geopolitical tensions remain a wild card. China is embroiled in trade disputes with the United States and Europe, home to many major multinational corporations. As they think twice about their business in China, the journey suffers.

Here’s what you need to know about the state of China’s travel economy.

Travel to China is almost at a standstill amid the pandemic. It will not fully recover until 2025.

Throughout the pandemic, China has enforced some of the strictest travel rules in the world. Overseas travelers who managed to enter the country sometimes had to quarantine at their own expense for up to two months.

As of December 2023, international flight capacity — essentially the number of seats available on flights to and from China — was only 62 percent of what it was in December 2019, according to OAG, a data analysis firm. of flight But domestic travel has resumed: during the three-day weekend at the end of last month, the number of those flyers exceeded pre-pandemic levels by almost 10 percent.

By early 2023, there were only about 500 international flights each week in China, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China, the aviation regulator. Now there are about 4,600, and that number is expected to rise to 6,000 by the end of the year — about 80 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

A big test will come in February 2024 around the Lunar New Year, known as the Spring Festival, typically a heavy travel period when millions of workers travel to their hometowns. Chinese airlines are scheduling an additional 2,500 international flights to accommodate Spring Festival visitors, China’s aviation regulator said last week.

China’s transport officials said they expected 480 million rail trips to be made during a 40-day trip around the spring festival in the weeks before and after the Lunar New Year, a up nearly 40 percent from last year.

The high-speed train has become a more popular way of traveling in the country. China State Railway Group, the national railway operator, said rail trips exceeded 20 million at the start of the Golden Week holiday in October, a high, and the average number of passenger trips across the year exceeded 10 million.

Most analysts said they believed the full recovery of international travel would not occur until 2025.

In a January research note, economists at Nomura, a Japanese bank, said the pace of the sector’s recovery would largely be determined by how much Chinese travelers were willing to spend. Pandemic-era issues such as delays in issuing visas and passports that lasted until 2023 have been addressed.

“While supply-side constraints have eased, demand resistance is now beginning to falter, and strong headwinds remain for the recovery of China’s outbound tourism in 2024 and possibly 2025,” they wrote the Nomura economists.