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Disneyland eyes GBA in post-pandemic era

2021-10-28 15:27:03
source:Source: Chinadaily.com.cn
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An employee carries balloons in Hong Kong Disneyland during a group tour on Wednesday. The tour is part of a six-day visit to Hong Kong by a Chinese-mainland delegation of national top engineering experts and media representatives. Disneyland is one of the Hong Kong landmarks highlighted by the construction-themed event, following the Palace Museum in West Kowloon, and the North Lantau Hospital Hong Kong Infection Control Centre. Edmond Tang / China Daily

Officials of theme park say they expect new attractions to bring back mainland visitors again

Hong Kong Disneyland, which has attracted millions of Chinese-mainland visitors over the past decade, has set its sights on the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area for the theme park's post-pandemic recovery.

The region-focused move is in line with the trend of tourists preferring shorter trips amid the risk of the global pandemic, while seizing the opportunities offered by the cross-border cooperative project that involves more than 80 million people, said Anita Lai Pui-shan, Hong Kong Disneyland's vice president of communications and public affairs, during a media tour on Wednesday.Lai said that future visitors to the park will have a whole new experience with the new rides, such as the roller coaster in the themed land Arendelle: World of Frozen, which is under construction and set to open in 2022.

The park, which opened to the public in September 2005, gave a boost to the city's tourism industry after the city's economic downturn that followed the financial crisis of 1998. In 1999, the Hong Kong government announced a joint venture company with The Walt Disney Co. The new company - Hong Kong International Theme Parks Ltd - was placed in charge of the construction and the operation of Hong Kong Disneyland Resort, which includes Hong Kong Disneyland as well as its affiliated hotels and other related businesses.

In a further attempt to spur Hong Kong's economy, hard-hit by the outbreak of SARS in 2003, the central government approved the Individual Visit Scheme, allowing residents of four cities in Guangdong province to visit Hong Kong and Macao. The program, which has brought in tens of millions of visitors from the Chinese mainland, was gradually expanded to cover residents of 49 Chinese-mainland cities, including 21 cities in Guangdong province; Shanghai; Chengdu, Sichuan province; and Wuhan, Hubei province.

As of the end of 2018, over 269.3 million visitors had come to the city under the program, according to the Tourism Commission under the Hong Kong government's Commerce and Economic Development Bureau.

The theme park, one of the beneficiaries of the burgeoning number of tourists, has had over 85 million visitors from all over the world since 2005.

In 2019, the amusement park received 6.5 million visitors, of which one-third, or about 2.15 million, were from the Chinese mainland.

At its peak, visitors from the mainland comprised 48 percent of the theme park's total attendance of 7.5 million in the 2014 fiscal year, replacing the local tourists as the largest source of visitors.

The large number of tourists from the Chinese mainland has greatly stimulated the city's economy and created hundreds of thousands of jobs.

For the amusement park alone, as of the 2020 fiscal year, it has contributed a total of HK$113.7 billion ($14.6 billion) to Hong Kong's GDP growth accumulatively and created 271,300 jobs, according to Lai.

Today, the amusement park is facing a drop of visitors due to the pandemic-related border restrictions. Lai said the struggling park is counting on the Greater Bay Area to aid in its recovery.

The initial phase of the park, which is at Penny's Bay on Lantau Island, was jointly built by Hong Kong-based China State Construction Engineering (Hong Kong) Ltd, or CSHK, and by Shimizu Corp, a Japanese architectural, civil engineering and general contracting firm.

CSHK combined foreign countries' experience and leading technology with China's traditional engineering technology and craft in the construction process, forming 12 construction methods, receiving seven patents, issuing 11 journal articles and two monographs, and winning several national awards.