Walk from home: Hong Kong tour company moves online to survive COVID-19 pandemic
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Walk from home: Hong Kong tour visitor moves online to survive COVID-nineteen pandemic
Julianne Chan, 27, joins a virtual tour about architecture in Kennedy Town, following the coronavirus disease (COVID-nineteen) outbreak in Hong Kong, China Aug 16, 2020. (REUTERS/Tyrone Siu)
HONG KONG: A Hong Kong tourism company has moved its walking tours online to reach a travel-starved audience unable to explore new places due to coronavirus restrictions.
The company, Walk in Hong Kong, runs gratuitous online tours in Cantonese focussed on local history and culture, with help from government subsidies and private donations. While bookings for its regular in-person tours typically took a week to fill, one recent virtual tour filled 70 spots overnight.
It at present plans to run such tours in English language for an overseas audition on a permanent basis. It expects to get-go charging around HK$100 (Us$thirteen) per person from next month.
The tours are filmed with a telephone and a gimbal and are interactive, with specialist guests such as architects available to reply questions. Eight people are working in two teams, one on the ground, the other interacting with the audition from a studio in between tour stops.
"We are thinking near turning it into a programme that appeals to overseas guests, for example talking about Hong Kong'due south history and Hong Kong'due south current events, to explain what is happening to the urban center," said managing director Olivia Tang.
"We can have hundreds of people from all around the world nourish at the same time."
Tourism in Hong Kong has been crippled in the past year starting time past pro-democracy protests, so by the pandemic. Many countries take also issued travel advisories after Beijing introduced a sweeping national security law last month that tightens the central regime'southward grip on Red china's freest city.
Tourist arrivals plummeted 99.vii per cent in June from a year earlier to fourteen,606.
READ: Commentary: How did Hong Kong become to a third wave of COVID-19 infections?
Julianne Chan, 27, joined a recent tour virtually architecture in Kennedy Town, the neighbourhood where she grew up, after having to abolish a trip to London due to COVID-19.
"During the pandemic ...there'south not a lot y'all can practise," she said.
"With these constraints, I would still go on a virtual tour, only if I tin can choose, I would always opt for just going abroad myself and seeing with my ain optics."
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Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/business/hong-kong-virtual-city-tours-covid-19-243766
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