China’s ‘Zero-Dollar’ Tourists Are Getting a Cautious Welcome
Before Covid, the nation’s low-spending tour groups weren’t all that popular. But after two quiet years, almost everyone is glad to have them back.
Throngs of tourists mob the Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia, one of Chinese vacationers’ favored foreign destinations, in 2018.
Photo: Getty Images
Before the pandemic, travel agent Zhao Ling spent much of her time helping Chinese clients visit Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia cheaply. Based in the city of Deyang in Sichuan province, she organized inexpensive package tours that shepherded busloads of travelers through affiliated stores and restaurants—and steered customers away from other, locally owned businesses. Deriding the all-inclusive packages as so-called zero-dollar tourism because much of the money—lots of it spent before visitors left China—didn’t filter throughout the local economies, critics blamed agents like Zhao for overcrowding beaches, temples and other popular sites, from Phuket’s boisterous Patong entertainment district to Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple complex.
“Of course they don’t like us,” Zhao says. “No one does.”