LUNG-WASHING TOURS BECOMES HOT IN CHINA

Lung-washing tours
becomes hot in China

China’s notoriously long-existing air pollution has now fuelled a surge in overseas ‪#‎travel‬ among its citizens, who have yearned to escape haze and get a breath of fresh air.

According to the Asian Development Bank and Tsinghua University, only one percent of China’s cities meet the World Health Organization’s air quality standard. With heavy smog sometimes blanketing Beijing and its neighboring cities, it is driving more and more people overseas to “cleanse” their lungs.

Dora Di is one of them. Just getting back from a long-weekend in South Korea, the tourist told CCTV that the primary reason for her travel lies in the fresh air in the country where there is almost no air pollution. Her next destination is Thailand whose clean environment and food are the most important things she expects when travelling.

Nearly 90 percent of mainland tourists say that other places in Asia are their favourite destinations for the dubbed “smog-escaping tours”. Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan have been the most preferred, receiving 70 percent of visitors. Other popular destinations include South Korea, Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, and the United States, each receiving around a million Chinese tourists in 2014.

Tour companies across the country are playing the “clean air card”, as they have recognized how important it means to their business.

Marketing manager of Beijing My Tour International Travel Service, Du Haichen, agrees that health and environmental benefits are important to their business. “In 2014, we received 30,000 overseas bookings. Eighty percent of these were customers looking for clean air, sun and sea,” he said.