Rather than count footfall and events, the city should focus on spending and impact, plan district tourism seriously and work on new assumptions
3-MIN READ3-MINKun TianKun Tian is a senior lecturer in marketing and analytics at Kent Business School, UK, and a fellow at the Taihe Institute. Published: 5:30am, 21 May 2026When it comes to tourism, Hong Kong is recovering footfall faster than spending and officials need to realise that the two are not the same.
That is progress. It is not a return of the old tourism economy.
Tse flagged a second pattern: overnight and long-distance travellers outspent day visitors who once formed the bulk of cross-border arrivals. That is the yield economy in miniature. Fewer, deeper visits create more value than dense, shallow ones, and current headline metrics do not separate the two.
