“Business up until mid-2019 was great,” says Amy Overy, who set up Hong Kong Greeters in 2012, catering principally for overseas visitors. “We ran 367 private tours and employed two full-time and three part-time guides in the 2018/19 financial year. We managed 200 tours from April 2019 until the end of January 2020, when all future bookings were cancelled. We’d also suffered a 15 per cent cancellation rate in 2019, compared to 1 per cent in previous years.”

Overy, who came to Hong Kong from Kent, England with her husband in 2009, says that initially – apart from updating the company website – she didn’t know what to do, as there was little concrete information about Covid-19, so any planning would have been based on guesswork.

“Then there was some light at the end of the tunnel with the Tourism Board’s Holiday at Home programme, which aimed to promote local tours to residents,” she says. “We jumped on board and started advertising our favourite places to guide people, which included hidden parts of Lantau and island-hopping in Sai Kung. This worked well in June 2020 but came to a juddering halt in July [the same year], after the tightening of restrictions.”

In the meantime, Hong Kong Greeters has been running virtual tours for overseas guests on a one-on-one or group basis. Tours of Aberdeen by water and Central’s heritage have both proved popular with clients in Britain and the United States, Overy says.

“We also launched Hong Kong Quests, created by my clever colleague and guide, Nicola Beach,” she adds. “They are a game played outdoors, where you have a map booklet with a set of clues to follow to help solve a mystery, and learn about the local neighbourhood at the same time.

“We have a Bank Heist story, in Central, and a Spooky Ghost story, in Wan Chai, and we’re developing another about a time traveller lost in Tsim Sha Tsui. We got help from the Lion Rock Press to design the Quest booklets so they’re very attractive and user-friendly. It’s a great family activity and we’ve adapted for schools and businesses – though we’ve made the adult version harder to crack.”

More recently, the company was granted a group tour exemption, initially for 30 people, and then for 100, and it partnered with Hong Kong Dolphinwatch and junk operator Lazydays to help get them up and running again.

“But as far as local tours are concerned, it’s been tough. Residents are looking for things to do, but the price and the interest have to balance out for them to be successful,” Overy says.

“I think residents are crying out for things to do, but one-off events seem to be most popular, as traditional tours are competing against all other free-time activities. Not being able to travel for two years, most people have taken it upon themselves to explore their own city extensively.

“Virtual tours are also intermittent now as the rest of the world has opened up and if anything there is a desire to spend less time in front of a screen. We have still been running them for local schools and colleges here in Hong Kong, though, as they struggle to do outdoor group activities.”

While life has been tough for tour companies in Hong Kong, it has been equally tricky in other Asian cities, as Laura Blackhall – who founded Hello! Tours – knows all too well.

“Our tours are based around history, culture, food and local life in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo – all three closed their borders due to Covid-19 and have been equally badly affected,” says Blackhall, who hails from Chester, in England.

“That said, at the time that Hong Kong closed its borders because of Covid-19, the business was already running at nearly 50 per cent down due to the protests. When the protests started, we received many cancellations from clients feeling uncomfortable travelling to Hong Kong.”

Blackhall notes that as the world has started to adjust to Covid-19, Asia, despite containing many of the first locations to lock down, has been slow to reopen.

“So I would say that whilst everyone has been in a very similar situation so far, the tourism professionals in Hong Kong will probably continue to be affected for a much longer time than those in other countries.”

Hello! Hong Kong has devised activities aimed at residents as part of its strategy to adjust to new realities. The activities assume basic knowledge on subjects such as history and culture but delve deeper, a typical example being a two-hour class introducing the techniques of Chinese ink painting.

In hope, the company has also designed tours exclusively for visitors who are part of a “travel bubble”. If the group numbers more than four, an exemption to social-distancing requirements can be arranged with the Travel Industry Council.

The old aphorism that crisis is best viewed as an opportunity rang true for Victor Cheung, when Hidden Gems Travel, which he had founded, started to fade away for lack of custom.

“The effect was truly dire – there were just no international tourists,” says Cheung, who was born and brought up in Hong Kong. “The only thing to do was look to the domestic market and think up some new tours.”

Going virtual with lessons in the Chinese zodiac and character-writing was a good first step, but some of Cheung’s on-the-ground ideas – a two-hour jaunt around Chungking Mansions and a hike around some of the more notable graves in Hong Kong’s cemeteries – really caught the popular imagination.

“Part of the secret of our success is taking people somewhere that they may be familiar with – like Tsim Sha Tsui or Happy Valley – and then delving a bit deeper,” he says. “Even people who’ve spent their whole lives here have found out things they’d never realised.”

Two of Cheung’s other tours – mountain biking along the mainland border and an on-trend zip around the city’s most Instagrammable spots – have also notched up a steady stream of resident customers, local and expatriate, keen to do something a little different.

Like everyone in the tour-guide business, Cheung has his fingers crossed for the coming year.

“I can’t see what the future holds at the moment,” he says. “But we really need the borders to open up again so we can get back to work in earnest.”