Hong Kong tours: how local guides are adapting to survive the Covid-19 shutdown, with Instagram-spot visits, mystery solving and cemetery trips proving popular with city residents
- Ghosts in Wan Chai? A bank heist in Central? One company’s new tour sees participants given a map and a set of clues to figure out a mystery
- Another’s two-hour jaunt around Chungking Mansions and a hike around some of the more notable graves in Hong Kong’s cemeteries have caught locals’ imaginations
First the 2019 anti-government protests stymied Hong Kong’s independent tour guides. Then – mother of all double whammies – they were poleaxed by the Covid-19 pandemic. But now some are making a valiant effort to get back on their feet and cope with the new not-really-normal of the tourism industry.
In 2019, Hong Kong welcomed more than 55 million visitors, providing a ready market for local residents who could earn a respectable fee from showing tourists where to eat, shop, sightsee and revel in “Asia’s World City”. But in the first 10 months of 2021, a mere 72,458 people passed through immigration, mostly from China, and few of those had the time or inclination to concern themselves with anything like a “must-see”.
For small-business owners like tour guides, the only option has been to adapt.
“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.
