Hong Kong welcoming foreigners again, but business travelers still wary

The first foreign travelers arrived at Hong Kong International Airport on May 1, after authorities relaxed strict Covid entry rules. But residents and non-resident visitors must spend seven days in compulsory quarantine in a government-approved hotel, discouraging many business travelers.

Business leaders said the mandatory quarantine and the risk of flights being banned when travelers test positive for Covid-19 remained too off-putting. Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce CEO George Leung warned that the city risked falling behind rivals that were opening up and moving forward swiftly. “When every global business hub was shut down due to Covid-19, the cost of the disruption was borne by all, so we were all in the same boat,” he told the South China Morning Post. “Now that the whole world is opening up and moving forward, Hong Kong risks losing out.” He said expatriates or professionals working with multinational firms who could afford to stay for at least a month would come to Hong Kong, but they were in the minority. Most business travelers, including those taking part in exhibitions or meeting clients, came for a shorter period and preferred quarantine-free travel, he added. Peter Burnett, Chairman of the British Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, agreed, saying: “Most people on a business trip to Hong Kong want to spend perhaps a week. If they’ve got to spend a week in quarantine, and then a week out meeting people, it becomes altogether too time-consuming.”

At the same time, he added, travelers had to be mindful that their trips might be affected if Hong Kong banned flight routes because arriving passengers tested positive for Covid-19. He said business trips were usually scheduled carefully with visits to multiple locations in the region, and a flight suspension could disrupt the whole program. “This becomes a huge disincentive to schedule a trip to include Hong Kong,” he said. A foreign businessman based in Hong Kong said he would not recommend that his business partners visited any time soon. “Quarantine is one issue, but the risk of being sent to a compulsory isolation facility is another,” he said, referring to the government-run facilities with minimum amenities where patients with mild symptoms were isolated. Businesses have called for quarantine-free travel with mainland China and overseas, but Hong Kong has stuck with its “dynamic-zero” Covid-19 approach to tackling the pandemic with strict quarantine, isolation and social-distancing restrictions. The city has recorded more than 1.2 million infections and over 9,300 related deaths.

Visitors have to book a room for their seven nights of quarantine at one of 55 designated hotels, and risk having to rebook if their arrival date changes because of a flight ban. The government eased its mechanism for triggering a flight suspension. From May 1, an airline will face a five-day route ban if a flight brings in five passengers found to be infected with Covid-19, or 5% of those on a single flight, whichever is greater. The threshold was previously three passengers who tested positive, with a longer ban of seven days. There have been 83 flight route bans so far this year. Currently there are nine bans in place, affecting Cathay Pacific Airways, Thai Airways, Emirates Airlines, Air Canada, Turkish Airlines and Qatar Airways. One traveler said: “Having to change flights and hotels is not easy or cheap. Anyone who wants to get back on a specific date can’t count on it.” In the first three months of this year, when Hong Kong battled a surging fifth wave of Covid-19 infections, there were 11,490 visitors, down 30.5% from the same period last year, the South China Morning Post reports.

Hong Kong’s flight suspension mechanism should be scrapped as current quarantine measures are enough to reduce the risk of Covid-19 spreading in the community, a government pandemic adviser has said, as the number of new cases fell to a three-month low. But Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the Center for Health Protection’s communicable disease branch, warned that a rebound in infections was possible following the easing of social-distancing curbs that had been in place for months, especially the end to the ban on international travelers. “The caseload has been decreasing since the peak in early March to 300 today, but we still have to observe the situation, as we have been slowly relaxing social-distancing measures,” Chuang said. “The increase in the flow of people and gatherings may cause a rebound in cases.”