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Hong Kong gears up for expected 600,000 mainland Chinese visitors for Labour Day ‘golden week’ but hotels, restaurants fret about manpower

  • It will be the first Labour Day ‘golden week’ holiday after more than three years of pandemic-related border closures
  • Fanny Yeung of the Travel Industry Council says an estimated 600,000 mainlanders will visit Hong Kong between Saturday and May 5

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Tourist take a walk along the waterfront in Tsim Sha Tsui. Photo: Xiaomei Chen
Hong Kong’s tourism industry is gearing up for an expected influx of 600,000 mainland Chinese visitors during the Labour Day “golden week” holiday, although the catering and hotel sectors have warned that manpower shortages persist.
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It will be the first Labour Day golden week holiday after more than three years of pandemic-related border closures. Quarantine-free travel between the mainland and Hong Kong resumed fully in February.

Fanny Yeung Shuk-fan, executive director of the Travel Industry Council (TIC), on Sunday said an estimated 600,000 mainlanders would visit Hong Kong between next Saturday and May 5, with more than 80 per cent of them being individual travellers.

She said the estimation was based on information gathered from the catering and hotel industries.

Time for some photos on The Peak, a popular destination for tourists in Hong Kong. Photo: Elson Li
Time for some photos on The Peak, a popular destination for tourists in Hong Kong. Photo: Elson Li

Some 840,000 mainland visitors arrived in Hong Kong in the first three days of the Labour Day holiday in 2019, a five-year high at the time. About 600,000 mainlanders visited in the same three-day period in 2018.

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