A recent statistic showed that in September, Beijing received a record number of 357,000 tourists in one month. Such record is expected to be rewritten in 2008 as 550,000 people will visit Beijing during the time when the Olympic Games are held in the city.

In the September statistics, most hotels agreed that business travelers and individual tourists boosted the fast growing tourist flow. While the former group came to attend conferences and commercial events, the upcoming Olympic Games attracted the latter group to come for a preliminary visit to the city.

A global sightseeing company confirmed in its analytical report that among the three million overseas tourists, 70 per cent of them came as individual tourists. Sightseeing tourists were now catching up with commercial travelers to be the main group to visit Beijing and these tourists often placed high requirements to resources and services in the city.

It is expected that in the upcoming Olympic Games, about 550,000 people will come to Beijing. How can the city handle the accommodation issue for such a large number of tourists? Director of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Tourism Yu Changjiang said the current accommodation facilities in Beijing, with 5,300 accommodation places and 490,000 bedspaces, could basically meet the demands when the Olympic Games are held.

However, problems remain to be solved, as most of the non-star accommodative places in Beijing are currently hard to find through reference means. To solve this problem, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Tourism is now doing a comprehensive research work of non-star-ranked accommodative places and intends to publicize their detailed information by 2007.

Meanwhile, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Tourism plans to establish criteria for these accommodative units to guarantee that service quality provided by them meet requirements. Some international companies, which are said to have rich experiences in providing services to individual tourists, will be introduced. As a first step for these, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Tourism is now doing a feasibility report for introducing the sightseeing double decker bus.

(Xinhua News Agency October 27, 2005)