Tourists from the Chinese mainland are returning to Hong Kong, with arrivals seeing a pickup in July for the first time in 13 months, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported Thursday.
The Hong Kong Tourism Board official said the turnaround would last until the end of 2016.
The number of mainland visitors to Hong Kong, who represent about 75 percent of visitor arrivals, rose 2.2 percent year-on-year last month, the newspaper said, citing Hong Kong Tourism Board Chairman Peter Lam Kin-ngok.
The rise of mainland visitors to Hong Kong helped yield an overall positive arrival figure for the first time since June 2015, with growth of 2.6 percent year-on-year, according to the newspaper.
Lam attributed the turnaround to a series of factors such as the easing of the negative impact of last year's mainland policy change in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, restricting the use of multiple-entry permits.
"With a gradual leveling-off of anti-mainlander sentiment, the peak season for tourism - summer vacation - witnessed the return of mainland tourists to Hong Kong," said Zhu Zhengyu, a tourism analyst at Beijing-based market consultancy Analysys International.
Zhu told the Global Times on Thursday that Hong Kong attracted some mainland visitors from other destinations like Taiwan, which is now in typhoon season, and some countries and regions in Southeast Asia due to political reasons.
Recent terror threats have cooled mainland tourists' enthusiasm for travel to some European countries and regions, and the appreciation of the yen has made Japan less attractive, experts noted.
The turnaround would continue in the third quarter this year, Zhu forecast.
"There is a rising trend for mainland tourists to have summer vacations and they are likely to take a four-day trip to Hong Kong, including visiting Hong Kong Disneyland, Hong Kong Ocean Park and a night tour of Victoria Peak," an employee at China Travel Service (Hong Kong), who preferred to be anonymous, told the Global Times on Thursday.
"For mainland visitors, group travel has now become less welcome while independent travel is enjoying increasing popularity," the employee said, noting that independent visitors to Hong Kong grew 75 percent during the first seven months.
"I will travel to Hong Kong later August for a short trip as it only takes me two hours to fly there," Lauren Cai, a 20-something white-collar worker from Southwest China's Chongqing, told the Global Times Thursday.
"Delicious food and relatively lower goods prices in Hong Kong are attractive to me," she said.
During the first half of 2016, the Hong Kong government stepped up efforts to tighten regulation of the tourism sector and increased investment to upgrade its travel environment in a bid to become more attractive, according to Zhu.
The Hong Kong government announced plans to allocate HK$240 million ($30.9 million) to promote the city's tourism image around the world, media reports said in April.
"The great consumption power of mainland tourists has made a contribution to Hong Kong's tourism income," Zhu said.
