On the morning of September 3rd, with the theme of "Revitalizing World Tourism and Energizing City Development," the 2021 WTCF Beijing Fragrant Hills Tourism Summit & World Conference on Tourism Cooperation and Development kicked off at the China National Convention Center. Hu Heping, Minister of Culture and Tourism, and Chen Jining, Deputy Secretary of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee, Mayor of Beijing and Chairman of WTCF Council, addressed the opening ceremony.
In his speech, Hu Heping noted that the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of China is willing to continue promoting international tourism exchange and cooperation with international organizations and governments. We would create opportunities in times of opening-up, tackle challenges through cooperation, and join hands to enhance the high-quality development of world tourism.
Hu also appealed for mutual benefits and win-win outcomes. We should make full use of WTCF, Beijing Fragrant Hills Tourism Summit and other platforms to extensively carry out multilateral, bilateral and regional tourism exchange and cooperation.
We would strengthen the overall coordination and launch more policy initiatives to maintain a fairer, healthier, and more organized market environment and help tourism enterprises tide over difficulties.
We would support the innovative development of the tourism industry, introduce more new forms of business, new participants, and new modes to improve capacity building for sustainable development. We should proactively adapt to new trends in technological development, give full play to 5G, big data and other new technologies to improve industrial efficiency, optimize industrial structure and discover new driving forces of industrial growth.
We sincerely hoped that international tourism organizations would keep building platforms for exchanges and cooperation, and that national governments, tourism departments, associations and tourism enterprises would join hands to pool their wisdom and make further contributions to the recovery and growth of world tourism.
"As the world's tourism sector is gradually recovering, it is also witnessing reform and transformation," Chen Jining said in his speech.
Over the past year, Beijing has made great efforts in regular prevention and control of COVID-19 while concentrating on promoting the resumption of work and production. The economy has been growing with a consolidating momentum for the better, showing strong resilience of Beijing.
We will enhance exchanges, cooperation and experience sharing with WTCF member cities and institutions, so as to play a greater role in global tourism revitalization.
Chen Jining appealed to governments of world tourism cities to strengthen cooperation against COVID-19, to explore possibilities of building an information-sharing platform for preventing and controlling COVID-19 and establishing a travel safety safeguards mechanism, to implement more effective incentive policies and further support travel agencies, restaurants and hotels and other market players, to reinforce workers training and labor rights protection so as to lay a solid foundation for revitalizing tourism.
We will proactively develop new models of cross-sectoral integration and promote the digital and intelligent transformation of tourism with technological empowerment. Enterprises will attach importance to self-improvement and give full play to technology to innovate tourist service and ultimately achieve greater benefits.
Tourist cities should help each other by reinforcing cooperation, carrying out publicity and promotion, sharing quality cases and cooperation programs of tourism development, jointly formulate and improve industry risk evaluation standards and create a collaborative tourism environment.
As one of the five summits of the 2021 CIFTIS, the conference aims to build a communication and exchange platform for world tourism in the post-covid era. Participants exchanged their ideas on various topics including measures and policy implementation, the rapid recovery of the tourism industry and evaluation of the recovery results.
Zurab Pololikashvili, Secretary-General of the World Tourism Organization, Vladimir Norov, Secretary-General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Ángeles Muñoz Oriol, Mayor of Marbella (Spain) and some other Mayors of sister cities delivered their speeches via video link. Leaders of Beijing, Wang Hong and Jin Wei, also attended the conference.
(Article: Yang Qi)
