Tourism Dispersal: The Cloud Over Asia’s Sunny Tourism Landscape

As tourism demand gathers pace, Check-in Asia examines an issue that is starting to concern tourism policy makers from Beijing to Luang Prabang.

What do the Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River, Italy’s picturesque Cinque Terre villages and the ancient Inca ruins of Macchu Pichu in Peru share in common? The answer is that all three tourism hotspots have implemented restrictive access policies to manage visitor numbers during peak travel periods.

The limiting of visitors at the Three Gorges Dam to a maximum of 30,000 per day during the 2016 Spring Festival holiday highlighted an evolving issue: too many tourists are travelling to leading cities, islands and sites of natural splendour. As destinations across Asia and worldwide clamour to attract more Chinese tourists, it was intriguing to watch China’s own tourism planners adopt the once taboo issue of tourism dispersal.

Tourism dispersal – the sustainable management of visitor flows across a country to reduce overcrowding in the most popular locations – is a white-hot subject, particularly in Asia. Demand for leisure travel is thriving, and high-profile airport expansion projects from Beijing to Phuket and Yangon to Singapore signal that governments expect intra-regional tourism flows to continue on an upward trajectory.

More Flights, More Travellers

Expanded flight networks are the catalytic factor. Asia Pacific carriers recorded a demand increase of 8.2% in 2015 compared to 2014, and while a protracted global slowdown looms, the financial ability and willingness to travel is proving a powerful force – supported by the inexorable rise of low-cost carriers across the region.

“Many airports are already operating at capacity, and it is only going to get worse,” notes the Boston Consulting Group in its report entitled The Connected Airport: The Time Is Now. “Between 2015 and 2034, air traffic will grow at a projected 4.6% annually, even faster in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These experiences will create delays and degrade the customer experience.”

China, of course, is a headline example because of its vast population – and with 120 million outbound travellers in 2015, it is contributing to the increased tourism numbers at the world’s most highly prized destinations. But as the headline writers focus on China’s overseas travellers, the compression effects on domestic tourism are often overlooked.

With an estimated 4.38 billion domestic tourism trips set to be made within China this year, according to the China National Tourism Administration, the pressure on tourism and transport infrastructure is intense, particularly during the two week-long national holidays celebrating Spring Festival and China National Day. The Chinese capital alone claims to have received 273 million tourists in 2015, up from 261 million in 2014.

The impact of China’s increased propensity to travel is starting to show. Sections of the Great Wall of China are frequently shuttered for much needed restoration works caused by excessive visitation. In northwestern Xinjiang, glacier tourism has been banned, despite garnering an estimated RMB1 billion in revenues in the past 12 years, because high volumes of tourists are contributing to the accelerating rate of glacier shrinkage, state media noted in February.

Implementing Tourism Dispersal Programmes

Japan is also urgently seeking to disperse tourists more evenly across its landscapes. The record 19.73 million visitors to Japan in 2015, representing a staggering 47.3% uplift from 2014, fell fractionally short of the 20 million visitors target originally set for 2020, the year Tokyo will host the Olympic Games. Visitors from China accounted for 4.99 million of the 2015 total, followed by 4 million from South Korea and 3.67 million from Taiwan.

While welcoming the tourism expenditure that its stagnating economy craves, the Japanese government is actively encouraging visitors to journey beyond the so-called “Golden Route,” of Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. In November 2015, Japan’s Transport Ministry signalled its intention to reduce, or possibly eliminate, landing fees at 25 of the country’s regional airports. The Japan Tourism Agency is also promoting 12 tourism zones that are largely untapped by inbound visitors, including the Kujuku Islands, Yoshino River in Shikoku and Hamanako Lake in Shizuoka.

The need to speed up tourism dispersal programmes is casting a cloud over strong visitor growth in South East Asia’s emerging tourism economies. Myanmar welcomed 4.68 million international arrivals in 2015 (up from 3.08 million in 2014), with a disproportionate number flocking to the “Big Four” destinations of Yangon, Mandalay, Bagan and Inle Lake. Despite a frenetic build-out of new hotels and a new airport under construction in Yangon, Myanmar’s infrastructure is struggling to cope with peak season demand, and hotel room rates, in particular, have risen significantly.

In Cambodia, 4.8 million arrivals were recorded in 2015, with the Khmer temple ruins of Angkor Wat attracting 2.1 million visitors. Meanwhile, the Khmer Times reported, in a February article entitled Koh Rong Samloeun’s Asia-Driven Tourism Boom, that the white-sand beaches on the island were “empty four years ago… [but] now workers can be seen scrambling over the frames of new bungalows along the shoreline, and speed boats arrive hourly from mainland Cambodia to drop off crowds of tourists bound for the island’s dive centres and resorts.”

This issue will become more entrenched in the coming years. Well-planned tourism dispersal policies are vital, not only for protecting Asia’s leading attractions but to ensure that travelling is enjoyable for everyone.

Check-in Asia Hotels & Travel researches and analyses tourism trends and developments across Asia Pacific. Since 2012, we have produced in-depth trends reports on the tourism economies of Myanmar, Malaysia and Japan, plus outbound travel from South East Asia and China.

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