Skiing is gaining popularity in Northern China and this trend is coinciding with China’s preparation for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. (Photo : Getty Images)
Local tourists flocked in record numbers during the Spring Festival break to the site of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Chongli, Hebei. The local tourism agency reported that the increase in number of visitors was 25.8 percent.
What boosted that number drastically were about 532,000 tourists who came over the seven-day Lunar New Year holiday to see the Genting Resort Secret Garden ski resort in Chongli. The resort is where the snow events of the 2022 winter games would be held such as skiing. Other venues for the international sporting event held every four years in 2022 are Beijing and Yanqing District.
Zhao Qiong, marketing director of the resort, said at the height of the Spring Festival, the resort welcomed up to 4,000 visitors daily. He added more visitors would have come had there been available transportation after snow closed the roads leading to the resort.
Before the Spring Festival, most of the visitors to the resort were from Tianjin, Beijing and other Hebei cities. But with the Lunar New Year, local guests from Shanghai, Guangzhou and other southern cities took the opportunity to see the sports venue.
Most of their guests were billeted in Beijing, but dropped by Chongli on their way back to the city to return to their jobs, said Liu Chunzhi who runs a hotel in the city with 15 rooms. As a result of the break, their family-run hotel was fully booked on the fourth day after Lunar New Year. Liu added that most of the tourists are not skiers, they just want to peek at the host city of the Winter Games.
The events to be held in Genting are biathlon, ski jumping, snowboard, Nordic combined and freestyle skiing during the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, according to Cihan.
