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individual visit scheme Essay

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Name: Yau Wai Yin Student ID: 13082341D
Topic: Hong Kong as a tourism hub
The impact of Individual Visit Scheme to Hong Kong
Individual Visit Scheme has being launched for ten years in Hong Kong. This scheme helps boost tourism and brings benefits to Hong Kong economy and society. However, the reality reveals that it also brings some negative impacts to Hong Kong. This paper examines both the arguments for and against Individual Visit Scheme in Hong Kong.
Promoting retail and accommodation development is one of the major positive outcomes of Individual Visit Scheme. The business receipts in retail and accommodation services keep increasing in these few years. For instance, profits in retail and accommodation services have grown …show more content…

For example, 27 corporate clients from Beijing and Shanghai participated in China Corporate Fam. They were invited to come to Hong Kong and experience the most recent MICE products and team building activities (HKTB, 2013b). Under Individual Visit Scheme, it is generally believed that participants come to Hong Kong in a more convenient way. Therefore, more mainlanders are willing to come to Hong Kong and there are more opportunities for them and Hong Kong people to communicate and work with each other.
However, it is suggested that Individual Visit Scheme triggers inflation in Hong Kong. There are some products that popular among the mainland travellers, such as Vita Lemon Tea and baby milk have noticeable increase in price level. Using a pack of six boxes of Vita Lemon Tea as an example, Consumer Council (as cited in Apple daily, 2012) discovers that the price of it rose 10%, from $13.5 to $14.9 between March 2013 and late September 2013. This illustrates that the spending of mainland tourists on daily products lead to higher price level in Hong Kong.
Apart from inflation, Individual Visit Scheme causes loss of local small and medium enterprises in Hong Kong. CBRE Hong Kong (2012) notes that Hong Kong ranked world’s top destination for luxury brands due to a large number of mainland tourists who demand for the benefit from the price variance

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