HONG KONG – Hong Kong’s online registration system for people to reserve a spot to travel to mainland China was overwhelmed by users on its first day of operation, signalling that the daily quota of 60,000 people is not enough to meet pent-up demand.
About 250,000 people in Hong Kong made bookings via the system in the first five hours after the website began operating on Thursday evening, local media outlets including Wen Wei Po and Sing Tao Daily reported.
As at early Friday morning, most slots for Sunday, the day of the border reopening, were already booked. Another popular date was Jan 21, the day before Chinese New Year, which had only limited availability left.
The reopening of the border, which has effectively been shut since early 2020, is aimed at helping Hong Kong revive social and business ties with the mainland that are at the core of its economy.
Some restrictions will remain, at least initially. In addition to the quota – which includes a 50,000-person cap on people travelling via land borders – anyone coming into the city from the mainland needs to show a negative polymerase chain reaction test result within a 48-hour window, and some land border checkpoints remain closed.
That has curtailed optimism about any short-term boost for Hong Kong’s economy, which has been battered by three years of strict Covid-19 curbs.
Wealthy mainland Chinese have taken their business to Singapore, which opened its borders earlier in 2022, local hotel and catering firms have struggled with a shortage of manpower after employees found work elsewhere, and hundreds of thousands of people have left the financial hub.
While Hong Kong officials said on Thursday that they will seek to increase the daily quota, it is unclear how quickly cross-border travel can return to pre-pandemic levels. In 2019, there was an average of 640,000 trips a day between the city and the mainland via the land border control points.
Separately, China expects the total number of passenger trips made by road, rail, water and air during the coming Chinese New Year to reach 2.1 billion in 2023, double 2022’s 1.05 billion during the same period.
Traffic officials said in a news briefing on Friday that daily passenger flights scheduled during the 40-day holiday transportation season known as chunyun, or “spring transport“ that starts on Saturday, is averaging about 11,000, about 73 per cent of the pre-Covid-19 level in 2019.
BLOOMBERG, REUTERS
