Guangdong Pilots Tourism-Friendly City Construction Guidelines
Seven Guangdong departments issued the Guangdong Tourism-Friendly City Construction Guidelines (Trial) to guide cities and counties in building tourism-friendly cities.
The Guangdong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, the Provincial Public Security Department, the Provincial Department of Natural Resources, and four other departments recently issued the "Guidelines for the Construction of Tourist-Friendly Cities in Guangdong Province (Trial)" (hereinafter referred to as the "Guidelines"), providing action guidance for all cities and counties (cities, districts) across the province in advancing the construction of tourist-friendly cities.
The Guidelines focus on the full-chain services of the tourism industry. Centering on seven aspects — environment-friendly, culture-friendly, business-form-friendly, order-friendly, service-friendly, all-people-friendly, and development-friendly — they put forward 50 construction guidelines to drive Guangdong tourism from "traffic growth" to "quality growth" and from a "passer-by economy" to a "retention economy."
In terms of environment-friendliness, the Guidelines specify that key areas should uniformly standardize tourism signage and improve the layout of scenic-area guides and rest spaces; they require culture and tourism districts to be fully equipped with convenient facilities such as direct drinking water and luggage storage, and municipal public toilets to be open free of charge 24 hours a day. In terms of culture-friendliness, they encourage public cultural venues to extend opening hours and implement a no-appointment mechanism, creating immersive cultural experience scenes. In terms of business-form-friendliness, they focus on cultivating diverse consumption, polishing the "Eat in Guangdong" signboard, cultivating the "Guangdong Gifts" brand, and creating a number of Cantonese-style trendy culture and tourism consumption scenes. In terms of order-friendliness, they innovate management measures, proposing that during peak tourist seasons hotel and homestay pricing in principle not exceed three times the normal listed price, establishing a culture and tourism bureau director's mailbox to respond to tourists' demands, and encouraging government agencies and public institutions to open public resources such as parking lots during peak tourist seasons. In terms of service-friendliness, they specify that the culture and tourism industry implement smiling service and the first-inquiry responsibility system, guide accommodation and catering enterprises to optimize warm services, and encourage scenic areas to launch benefit measures such as multi-day passes, senior discounts, and free repeat visits. In terms of all-people-friendliness, they emphasize host-guest sharing, improve age-friendly and special-group green channels, and equip ports and 5A-level scenic areas with multilingual translation services. In terms of development-friendliness, they focus on cultivating the "ticket stub economy," building urban culture and tourism IPs, and promoting the co-construction and sharing of cross-regional and cross-departmental resource data. (Chen Yiyao)
(This article is compiled based on a publicly released article by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism; see the link at the beginning of the article for the original.)