Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Economic fallout of visa-problems spreading

Entry tourist visa to Chinavia WikipediaWhile I feel that Danny Levinson's comparison with Schindler's list with the current visa-problems is far over the top, the economic fallout might be heavier than imagined.
Now with the visa hassles, hotels outside of Beijing are also being affected. One of my colleagues had a meeting with a 5-star hotel in Shanghai this morning and the general manager of the hotel was complaining about a 80+ person conference had canceled because many of the overseas visitors could not secure visas to enter China. We are hearing of other situations around China where hotels are seeing loss of business because of visa hassles for conference/exhibition attendees. A typical 4-star or 5-star hotel might only earn 50% of its revenue from hotel rooms, and the other part of its income comes from F&B and MICE (meetings, incentive travel, conferences, and exhibitions).
Levison might be suggesting that some of the affected hotels might be setting up systems to help out potential guests to get a visa. But of course, we cannot say that loudly, can we?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'd like to see how hotels can cope with the biggest problem - the requirement that people go back to their home countries to get visas. Given the number of executives who live expatriate these days, I'd say it's probably the number one visa problem for the business conference sector in China at the moment.