The popular holiday island of Hainan in southern China will relax limits on offshore duty-free shopping from Feb. 1.
The new policy allows non-locals to buy duty-free products worth up to 16,000 yuan (2,442 U.S. dollars) before they take flights to leave the island, without any restriction on the number of purchases, said Wang Huiping, deputy head of the provincial finance department, on Friday.
Currently, non-locals are allowed to buy duty-free items in Hainan twice a year, each purchase cannot be more than 8,000 yuan.
In addition, the new policy will see the island's two duty-free shops launch online services that will enable travelers to order on the Internet and pick the products at the airport, Wang said.
One shop is located in the provincial capital of Haikou and the other, the world's largest, in the resort city of Sanya.
Wang said the new measure, which is more flexible than the previous version, would help duty-free sales and tourism in Hainan.
The State Council, China's cabinet, gave Hainan permission to run a trial duty-free program in April 2011, part of a wider effort to make the island a world-class tourist destination by 2020.
Prior to the recent change, Hainan's offshore shopping policy had been altered twice. In 2012, the top spending limit was raised to 8,000 yuan from 5,000 yuan and three types of products, including cosmetics, were added. In 2014, 17 other product types were added to the list.
By the end of 2015, sales revenue from the program totaled 16.5 billion yuan, with perfume and cosmetics being most popular.
However, the numbers are not satisfactory. Analysis by the local finance department showed that sales revenue in 2015, 5.54 billion yuan, only accounted for 4.9 percent of the country's total luxury consumption.
Consumers complained that the purchase limit was too strict and there were not enough stores.
The island faces challenges to lure back luxury shoppers. According to a report on the Chinese luxury industry in 2015 published by Fortune Character, a domestic luxury market research institute, 78 percent of Chinese customers' spending on luxury goods took place abroad.
