Beijing Tourism Bureau Quotes Some Crazy Numbers on 2015 Visitors

Beijing received 273 million tourists during 2015, up from 261 million in 2014, spending a total of RMB 460 billion in the city.

Those numbers are based on person-trips, according to the Beijing Tourism Bureau (English version here), as published by People's Daily. That's a shocking number of people, although the bureau doesn't break down how it defines tourists, or whether it's simply based on arrivals in Beijing by some mode of transportation. That would include commuters from Tianjin and from bedroom communities like Yanjiao to the east, which is technically part of Hebei.

It also drives down the average spend per visitor. Tourism revenue contributed 7.5 percent of Beijing's gross domestic product in 2015, but each of these "tourists" is spending less than RMB 1,700 per person. The bureau also didn't break down what percentage of those visitors were from overseas.

Beijing entertained about five percent more tourists than in 2015, with RMB 22.3 million worth of goods sold during the first six months of the city's new value-added tax (VAT) rebate, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. About RMB 2.45 million was refunded during the period.

The strength of the domestic market is also demonstrate by that vast number of visitors. Beijing isn't even one of the 20 most popular international destinations in the world, according to MasterCard’s 2015 Global Destination Cities Index survey, which places London and Bangkok at number one and two in the world with almost 19 million overnight international visitors each.

273 million is incidentally about the same number of sharks that are believed to be killed for food every year.

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