Hunan's Tourism Revenue Exceeds One Trillion CNY in 2024

A meeting of directors of Hunan provincial culture and tourism authorities was held in Changsha on January 8, 2025. According to the conference, Hunan saw more than 700 million tourist trips in 2024, with its tourism revenue exceeding one trillion CNY. This marked that the cultural and tourism sector has developed into Hunan's fourth one-trillion-CNY industry.

In 2024, Hunan has made remarkable achievements in high-quality development in various fields. Taking the advantage of hosting the third Hunan Tourism Development Conference, Hengyang rolled out 86 key projects with a total investment of 75.3 billion CNY. A variety of activities held in the province have achieved extensive influence, including the first National Showcase of Playlets and Sketches, the 8th Hunan Art Festival, serial activities marking the 50th Anniversary of the Archaeological Excavation of the Mawangdui Han Dynasty Tombs, and Hunan Red Tourism Cultural Festival. Continuous progress has been made in the linkage reform of the museum system across the province. Hunan has yielded fruitful results in supporting the project to trace the origins of Chinese civilization and the fourth national survey of cultural relics. The Shanhai App, a digital cultural heritage platform, was launched, with the peak number of daily active users surpassing 700,000. A development plan has been implemented to expand cultural creative and tourism sectors, and the operating income of cultural tourism enterprises above the designated size increased 12% year on year during the January-September period. Four tourism projects were included in the third batch of national nighttime cultural and tourism consumption clusters. In 2024, Zhangjiajie topped among non-provincial capital cities across the country in the number of inbound trips. Fenghuang Ancient Town was successfully granted a 5A rating. Shibadong Village was honored as a "Best Tourism Village" by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UN Tourism).

According to the conference, this year Hunan will continue to focus on building a cultural powerhouse and a world-class tourist destination, and further deepening cultural institutional mechanism reform. The province will continue to deepen the reform of state-owned performing art troupes, formulate a proposal of promoting high-quality cultural resources to grassroots communities, and further promote the linkage reform of the museum system across the province. Hunan will center on the integration of culture and tourism as well as culture and technology, and develop a batch of platform projects with distinctive cultural tourism features and strong driving force. The province will work with universities to establish a research institute on sci-tech innovation in intangible cultural heritage. A three-year action plan on cultural tourism metaverse will be launched. Additionally, measures will be taken to build ten demonstration zones for the protection and utilization of historical and cultural heritage.