Tourism input on the rise

Beijing ShanHai will invest in infrastrucutre, recreational equipment and hotels at various scenic spots and help to boost their publicity. The company also launched Mounsey, its travel agency, at the forum and announced a three-year plan to open 100 Mounsey subsidiaries and 10,000 brick-and-mortar retail shops to receive travelers directly across the country.

It would also make investments in 80 scenic spots, 100 hotels and 60 homestays.

The goal is to integrate tourism resources and offer one-stop services to tourists, Wang explains.

The Beijing company is just one of the many forces that have increased their presence in the tourism sector.

China's leading domestic theme park brand Fantawild Adventure would open a new theme park worth 12.8 billion yuan in Zhejiang province's Ningbo.

The property developer Evergrande Group has planned to invest 300 billion yuan to develop 15 Children's World theme parks across China.

The State-owned Overseas Chinese Town has signed a 238-billion-yuan deal to develop culture and tourism in Shaanxi province's capital Xi'an. Other real estate giants, such as the Hong Kong-listed Sunac and Country Garden, have all moved into the tourism development business.

In 2017, direct tourism investment broke 1.5 trillion yuan in China, and the country's 144 tourism investment funds were worth 800 billion yuan, according to the former National Tourism Administration.

More than 2,000 big-scale tourism projects are now under construction, involving more than 5 trillion yuan in investment. A total of 130 scenic spots have seen investment above 10 billion yuan each, and 45 above 20 billion yuan each.

Investment in culture and tourism towns, theme parks, ethnic and religion tourism, camping sites and those offering TV, film tracks and performance have been on the rise in recent years, supported by the country's favorable policies towards tourism investment, including those that help qualified tourism enterprises go public.

"Private capital has taken an exceptional part in overall tourism industry investment, basically surpassing 50 percent," says Li Yuebo, managing director with Industrial Securities.

Private companies have put more focus on medium and high-end travel experiences and invested more in lesiure at first-tier cities, while governments and State-owned companies have put money in tourism infrastructure in the central and western parts of the country, Li says.

Speaking about future tourism development prospects, Mounsey's president Wang Tao believes the sky's the limit.

"Tourism would be the next gold mine in the next dozens of years in China, after real estate and the internet," Wang says.

Sunac's revenue was 360 billion yuan last year, and it ranks merely the fourth in the real estate industry, while the combined business of the tourism giants Ctrip and China International Travel Service Ltd amount to just 60 billion yuan, Wang says.

"With real estate giants flocking to the tourism industry, think about the changes they would bring," he adds.

"The good show just began."

Contact the writer at yangfeiyue@chinadaily.com.cn