Hong Kong offers 5 lakh free flight tickets to revive tourism

Hong Kong has planned to give five lakh air tickets and vouchers to woo tourists back to the international financial hub.

During the pandemic, the city largely aligned itself with mainland China's “zero-COVID” strategy and has relaxed its entry rules months slower than rivals such as Singapore, Japan and Taiwan.

Even after it reopened its border with mainland China in January, tourism recovery was sluggish.

The entire campaign will include over 200 events to underscore the city’s return.

The aim of the initiative to revive the economy of the city as well repair its global image following the violent protests in 2019, and repair the city’s global image which was damaged by often-violent protests in 2019, putting in place of strict security laws in 2020 and three years of isolation amid the Covid pandemic.

In 2022, Hong Kong received almost 605,000 visitors as the city slowly dropped its Covid restrictions, which was higher from 91,000 in 2021, Bloomberg reported. But before the pandemic hit, the city was visited by almost 56 million people as Hong Kong was Asia’s busiest international airport then.