Recently, the 2021 WTCF Beijing Fragrant Hills Tourism Summit & World Conference on Tourism Cooperation and Development was held in China National Convention Center. Those attended and delivered speeches were Hu Heping, China’s minister of culture and tourism, and Chen Jining, mayor of Beijing and president of WTCF council. Those gave video speeches were Zurab Pololikashvili, Secretary-general of UNWTO General Assembly, and Vladimir Imamovich Norov, secretary general of Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Hu Heping said that, since the pandemic, China had made positive effort in pandemic control and tourism recovery, resulting in steady development of Chinese tourism market. In the first half year of 2021, 1870 million Chinese traveled domestically, recovering to more than 60% of that of the same period of 2019. Currently, the pandemic led to more unstable and uncertain factors in world economy, but open and cooperative tendency wasn’t changed. Countries should stick to win-win cooperation, enhance international tourism cooperation, enhance coordination, support tourism enterprises to overcome difficulties, encourage innovation and creation and improve the quality of tourism development. China was willing to work with every country to create opportunities in an open environment, to solve problems in cooperation and to support high-quality development of world tourism with shared effort.
Chen Jining said that currently world tourism was transforming from recovery and reform to reshaping, showing strong driving force. Tourism established a series of new businesses and modes to cope with the pandemic. WTCF supported the globalization of tourism, promoted exchanges and cooperation between cities and overcome difficulties together. Beijing was the headquarter of the WTCF, so the city would initiate more communication, cooperation and experience sharing with member cities and institutions to play a more important role in the rejuvenation of world tourism.
Zurab Pololikashvili said that vaccines were injected to more and more people in the world, so tourism market in more countries were in the process of recovery. He believed the cooperation between WTCF and UNWTO would promote the “Future Development agenda for World Tourism Cities (2021-2030)” which could support tourism to be a strong pillar for city recovery and sustainable development.
The theme of the conference was “promote world tourism and empower city development”. There were 7 parts of the conference, namely, opening ceremony, global point of view, special forum, key speech, research result and sustainable development for tourism cities. “Annual Report on Development of World Tourism Cities 2020” and “Future Development Agenda for World Tourism City (2021-2030)”. The conference was broadcast on line to all over the world in Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.
Wang Hong, deputy mayor of Beijing and executive vice chairman of the council of WTCF, delivered the key speech. More than 360 guests from 40 countries attended the conference, including those responsible for international organizations, those responsible for investment institutions, envoys to China and representative of WTCF, famous tourism enterprises.