During this year’s May Day holiday, inbound tourists’ mobile payment consumption in China continued to show growth.
Data released by Alipay on May 5th showed that from May 1st to 3rd, inbound tourists spent money in China through two convenient payment services: Alipay’s “external card binding” and Alipay+ “outsourced internal use”, an increase of nearly 70% compared with last year’s May Day.
The “foreign card binding” is mainly to bind international bank cards for overseas tourists after coming to China, so that they can complete operations such as scanning QR codes to pay and make online purchases at mainland merchants; the “outsourcing internal use” is for overseas e-wallet users, allowing them to use local wallets to pay at merchants in mainland China through the Alipay+ network.
These two types of services respectively meet the consumption needs of overseas bank card users and overseas e-wallet users in China, and are also an important part of the facilitation of inbound payments in recent years.
From the perspective of consumption cities, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Jinhua Yiwu, Chengdu, Chongqing, Nanjing and Xi’an have become the top ten “China Travel” city destinations for Alipay consumption during this year’s “May Day”.
These cities include both first-tier and new first-tier tourism and business destinations, as well as cities with strong foreign trade attributes like Yiwu. Inbound consumption scenarios cover multiple fields such as sightseeing, business, retail, catering and local travel.
In terms of the source of tourists, tourists from Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Malaysia and other places use hometown e-wallets to spend higher amounts in mainland China.
Cross-border wallet interconnection has greatly reduced the cost for overseas tourists to re-download, register, bind cards and adapt to new payment tools. After entering mainland merchants, tourists can directly use their original wallets to complete payments.
High-frequency scenarios such as catering, transportation, retail, and travel are the areas where such payment services are most intensively used.
During the holidays, services frequently used by inbound tourists on Alipay include hailing taxis, public transportation, ordering food, borrowing power banks, renting cars for travel, and refueling.
Inbound payment services have extended from simple offline payment actions to various daily services after tourists arrive.
The smoothness of payment for independent travelers in travel, dining and temporary services will have an impact on their consumption radius and frequency in China.
Departure tax refund is also another important incremental information disclosed by Alipay during this year’s “May Day”.
Data shows that during this year’s May Day holiday, the number of departure tax refunds processed using Alipay increased by more than 40% compared with last month.
At some “buy now, refund now” merchants in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Xi’an and other places, inbound tourists can “touch” or “scan” through Alipay to apply for tax refund after consumption, and the payment will be received in as fast as 2 minutes.
After the combination of departure tax refund and mobile payment, the tax refund process has shifted from manual filling in forms and queuing at the airport to mobile processing.
After inbound tourists complete their shopping, the efficiency of tax refund receipt will affect their subsequent consumption experience; the smoother the connection between payment, tax refund and consumption services on the merchant side, the higher the efficiency of overseas tourists completing store purchases.
In addition, Alipay also revealed that outbound payments by Chinese tourists also continued to grow during the May Day holiday.
Hong Kong, Macao and Southeast Asia are still popular destinations. The number of Chinese tourists using Alipay to pay in Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Vietnam and other places has grown rapidly, and the number of overseas taxi purchases has increased by 115% year-on-year.
Among them, taxis and offline merchants in Hong Kong, China, have a high coverage of QR code payment, and transportation is still an important scenario for outbound mobile payment.
This year’s May Day cross-border payment data from Alipay embodies the changes in payment services at both the inbound and outbound ends.
On the inbound side, foreign card binding, outsourcing internal use, departure tax rebates and local life services have improved the convenience of foreign tourists’ consumption in China; on the outbound side, the frequency of Alipay’s use in transportation, taxis, offline QR code scanning and other scenarios continues to increase.
After cross-border tourism resumes, payment services are gradually extending from simple payment tools to complete itinerary services such as consumption, travel and tax refunds.
