Officials admit number of regular visitors has dropped
Mainland tourism chiefs said yesterday that the number of tourists visiting Beijing would peak after the Olympics but admitted that many regular visitors had been deterred from going to the city during the Games.
They declined to say if they were satisfied with the number of foreign arrivals in the capital, suggesting that Beijing's expected Olympics tourism bonanza might fail to materialise.
'According to the experience of previous Olympic cities, the peak tourism period in host cities comes after the closing ceremony of the Games,' Wang Zhifa, deputy director of the National Tourism Administration, said.
Many tourists not interested in attending the Games would wait until they had ended, with relatively few regular tourists likely to visit this month. He declined to estimate how many overseas visitors would arrive this month, or to speculate on whether the number would surpass last year's figure.
Officials have previously stated that Beijing expected to host between 400,000 and 500,000 overseas visitors during the Games, compared with the 420,000 who came in the same period last year. But many three- and four-star hotels in the capital have complained of low visitor numbers and have been forced to cut room rates to attract guests.