This aerial photo taken on Jan. 5, 2023 shows fireworks lighting up the sky over the Harbin Ice-Snow World theme park in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. [Xinhua/Wang Jianwei]

SHANGHAI, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) — By the end of the 2024-2025 ice and snow season, China's ice and snow leisure tourism sector is expected to receive over 520 million visitors, with its revenue exceeding 720 billion yuan (about 104.5 billion U.S. dollars), marking the sector a core development engine for winter tourism and ice and snow economy.

The estimated data were released by the China Tourism Academy in its annual report on China's ice and snow tourism development.

According to the report, China saw 344 million tourists in the sector during the 2021-2022 ice and snow season, raking in 474 billion yuan, and the sector is currently undergoing a positive growth momentum.

Thanks to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, policy innovations, and promotion by governments at all levels, the ice and snow tourism has injected vitality into traditional folk customs across the country, making the tourism options and consumption scenarios of the sector much more diverse, according to Dai Bin, president of the China Tourism Academy.

From 2016 to 2022, China invested about 2.88 trillion yuan in its infrastructure projects for ice and snow tourism. As of the end of 2022, nearly 9,000 relevant enterprises had registered in the ice and snow sector. In 2022 alone, 1,460 were newly added, up 20.1 percent year on year, said the report.

"As the consumption potentials of the domestic market continue to be released and the long-distance ice and snow tourism recovers, the number of China's ice and snow leisure tourists is expected to exceed 300 million in the 2022-2023 ice and snow season," said Han Yuanjun with the academy.

(Source: Xinhua)