Original title: This winter, why is the "Ice City" hot?
People's Daily overseas edition reporter Li Zhen
It received 3.0479 million tourists, with a total tourism income of 5.914 billion yuan - this is the report card of the cultural tourism market in Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province during the New Year's Day holiday in 2024. In the past few days, the "ice city" Harbin has become popular all over the network, and the number of tourists and the total tourism income have reached a historical peak. As an old ice and snow tourism city, why is Harbin particularly popular this winter?
Promote and publicize the "network sense" enough
Before the arrival of the ice and snow season, the Harbin cultural and tourism department has begun to increase online publicity and promotion, and strive to be new and brilliant.
Since September 2023, the Harbin Department of Culture and Tourism has planned to launch promotional videos with a "network sense", and short videos such as "Welcome to the North" and "Hogwarts Harbin Branch" have been intensively released to accumulate popularity for winter tourism.
In recent years, local cultural and tourism departments have realized the importance of online marketing and have come up with strange tricks to promote the recovery of the cultural tourism market. There are not only Ganzi in Sichuan, Suizhou in Hubei and other places, where the director of the Bureau of Culture and Tourism has endorsed and become Internet celebrities; there are also "village super" and "village BA" in Guizhou, which take the sports events loved by the masses as the entry point and attract huge traffic; and Zibo, Shandong, which has seized the popularity of "Zibo barbecue" and won wide acclaim on the Internet with thoughtful and enthusiastic service.
The cultural and tourism department of Heilongjiang Province also hopes to heat up the tourism market through the flow economy. He Jing, Secretary of the Party Leadership Group and Director of the Heilongjiang Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, said that the local government will actively use Internet thinking to attract traffic through new media platforms from the beginning of 2023.
The transformation of the operation mode of the Harbin Cultural Tourism Douyin account is quite representative. The little penguin from Harbin Polar Park, known as the "Taoxue Penguin", carried a small orange and white schoolbag and took small steps, walked up to the central street to interact with tourists, and stood in front of the large penguin snow sculpture for a group photo. Sophia Church has become a new European-style travel photography hotspot, attracting young tourists to check in. The "Internet celebrity" snowman has more "clones", all over the city, and even has a "Harbin snowman map".
It is reported that this ice and snow season, the Harbin cultural and tourism department has designed 100 activities in advance, including fireworks shows, winter swimming performances, "lighting up the century-old street" creative lighting festival, and millennium intangible cultural heritage folk "iron flower", etc., to enhance the experience and participation of tourists. As He Jing said, Harbin's popularity this year "is actually not accidental, we have been preparing for a year".
In addition to actively seeking the "hot spot" of online marketing, the local cultural and tourism department also pays special attention to the feedback of tourists and actively responds to the demands of netizens and tourists.
"We use the thinking of tourists to empathize and pay attention to the comments of netizens under each short video. We will take what tourists want. According to He Jing, many new ideas that amazed netizens came from responses to online comments. For example, some tourists said that it would be nice to see the moon during the photo shoot at Sophia's Church, so they made an artificial moon and used a drone to ascend to the sky. Some tourists feedback that the weather in Harbin is too cold, and a warm station has been added to the scenic spot for tourists to rest and warm up after playing. Some foreign tourists said that they didn't know how to eat frozen pears, a specialty of Northeast China, so there was a plate of frozen pears cut and placed in the restaurant in Harbin.
Tourists posted these new measures and experiences on social media platforms, attracting the attention of a wider range of netizens, which in turn further attracted more traffic to Harbin, forming a positive cycle.
Through various forms of interaction, this wave of traffic has also spilled over from Harbin, bringing up the tourism market in more places.
The process of 11 children from Nanning City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, studying in Heilongjiang triggered the whole network to "chase dramas". Netizens affectionately call the children "Little Sugar Orange". From Harbin to Mohe, the topic of "'Small Sugar Orange' Bravely Entering the Northeast" continues to attract attention. Departments at all levels in Heilongjiang Province escorted the children throughout the process, watching the snow, playing plows, setting off fireworks, and providing thoughtful services to warm the whole network. Guangxi responded positively and gave a gift in return, sending 200 tons of fruits such as 3 truckloads of sugar oranges and 8 truckloads of mandarins overnight to Harbin citizens for free. Many scenic spots in Baise, Chongzuo, Hezhou, Nanning and other places in Guangxi have announced that they will implement ticket discounts for tourists from the three northeastern provinces.
After leaving Heilongjiang, "small sugar orange" arrived in Jilin Province and visited Changchun, Yanji, Changbai Mountain and other places. In order to welcome the children, the ice sculptures in Changchun City wore hats in the shape of "sugar oranges", and the ski resorts of Changbai Mountain prepared children's ski slopes, which attracted the attention of netizens. The director of the Shenyang Bureau of Culture and Tourism in Liaoning Province issued a short video shouting, welcoming the "small sugar oranges" to come to stand and take a look when they pass by Shenyang on the return trip, visit the Forbidden City, eat chicken racks, and watch robots, and promise to prepare them for eating, drinking and having fun.
This wave of continuous hot searches has heated up the tourism market at the beginning of the year, making all parts of the country full of confidence in the upcoming winter holiday and Spring Festival travel peak. Recently, many scenic spots in Anhui, Sichuan, Gansu, Shaanxi, Jiangsu, Shandong and other places have also announced various preferential activities, and many netizens said that they were "excited" and "must go out to play during the holiday".
Turning "Popularity" into "Everlasting Red"
When the traffic comes, whether it can catch it in the follow-up and turn "red" into "long-term red" is a more important test for a city.
Therefore, in addition to the cultural and tourism departments working hard to "shout", more departments must work together. In this regard, Harbin has also made a lot of efforts.
In order to cope with the peak of passenger flow, on December 14, 2023, Harbin held a special meeting of the Joint Conference on Tourism Work to make arrangements for tourism safety and security, involving cultural tourism, network information, public security, transportation, emergency response, market, urban management, commerce and other departments.
In order to ensure the safety of tourists and citizens, on the eve of the New Year's Day holiday, Harbin set up a special class for service guarantee in the ice and snow season (ice and snow world), a special class for the security work of the city's cross-Chinese New Year's Eve and the opening ceremony of the ice and snow festival. In Harbin Ice and Snow World, in the face of nearly 40,000 passengers per day, the Harbin Municipal Public Security Bureau has made every effort to prevent risks, ensure safety, protect stability and promote development, so that each duty point has become a "safety shield" around tourists.
In order to create a safe, smooth and orderly road traffic environment, the traffic police department of the Harbin Municipal Public Security Bureau has all taken up their posts. During the New Year's Day holiday, more than 2,500 police officers and more than 400 police cars were dispatched every day, and more than 34,000 traffic violation cases were investigated and dealt with, and the city's four indicators of road traffic accidents decreased year-on-year.
In view of the large number of tourists in Sun Island and Ice and Snow World, Harbin Metro has produced and issued a "subway ferry ticket", with which passengers can take the subway for free. In order to ensure the safe return of tourists and citizens participating in the New Year's Eve activities, Harbin Public Transport Company has prepared 60 emergency support vehicles to ensure the evacuation of passengers at night.
In order to provide high-quality and low-cost accommodation services for foreign tourists and prevent the phenomenon of stealing customers, the Harbin Municipal Government requires that hotel operators should not overly float prices, do not blindly adjust prices, and do not inflate prices. On January 1st and 2nd, a symposium on improving the service quality of hotels in Harbin was also organized.
In order to maintain the beauty and cleanliness of the urban environment, the workload of sanitation workers has increased significantly. Mo Sen, squadron leader of the Central Street Squadron of the Daoli District Sanitation and Cleaning Center in Harbin City, said that during the New Year's Day holiday, the garbage bins on the roadside of the Central Street had to be cleaned every half an hour. A total of more than 150 sanitation team members took turns to work in shifts to ensure 24-hour uninterrupted cleaning operations in the central street area.
Not only Harbin, but the whole of Heilongjiang Province is emphasizing the need to improve the tourism consumption experience.
In December 2023, the General Office of the People's Government of Heilongjiang Province issued the "50 Measures for Heilongjiang Province to Release the Potential of Tourism Consumption and Promote the High-quality Development of the Tourism Industry". The document proposes to increase the supply of high-quality tourism products and services through measures such as enriching eco-tourism products and improving tourism infrastructure conditions. Through measures such as improving the service level of aviation, railways and highways, we will build a convenient, efficient, high-quality, safe and orderly "fast-forward" tourist passenger service system.
Heilongjiang has also launched a "cultural tourism experience officer" system in the province, making practical moves to increase the supervision of the tourism market, solving key problems that affect the experience of tourists, and comprehensively investigating and rectifying possible problems related to tourism-related accommodation, tourist toilets, catering, transportation, and tour guides. He Jing introduced that the province has recruited more than 380 "cultural tourism experience officers" to experience various scenic spots, homestays, and shopping stores, and rectify where problems are found, and more than 240 problems have been solved. In addition, Heilongjiang Province has also issued tens of thousands of questionnaires, asking tourists what they are not satisfied with, summarizing and sorting out the problems, and solving them one by one.
"We want to use the best service in exchange for the desire of tourists to come back, and never let any tourists feel at a loss. He Jing said that Heilongjiang Province will continue to improve the quality of service and improve the guarantee mechanism, so that every tourist can have a comfortable, rest assured and peace of mind. "With our warm service and warm reception, we will ensure that the weather is not cold, so that every tourist can feel a different temperature in Damei Longjiang this winter. ”
"Our Harbin people are really united"
This time, Harbin can be "out of the circle", and the local hospitable ordinary citizens are also important participants.
Many Harbin citizens took to the streets on their own initiative to become volunteers.
On Central Avenue and Sophia Church Square, steaming brown sugar ginger tea is placed on volunteer booths, which are given to tourists for free. In the vicinity of the railway station and scenic spots, many volunteers volunteered to guide tourists and introduce information about scenic spots in the cold wind. After the end of the trip, some tourists expressed their gratitude on social media: "Thanks to these citizen volunteers, let us feel the enthusiasm of Harbin people in winter." "The sincerity, friendliness and warmth of the people of Harbin add luster to the city. ”
Mr. Yao, a citizen of Harbin, also recently got a new job - driving a hitchhiker. However, his hitchhiker, free.
"Recently, there have been more tourists coming to Harbin, and there is a shortage of capacity for taxis and online car-hailing. As a Harbin native, I especially want to make some contributions to my city. At the end of December 2023, Mr. Yao and his colleagues and friends dispatched more than 10 private cars to form a small love team to pick up and drop off tourists for free. "Our original plan was to drive a ride, and if we met a tourist on the way, we would give it a ride for free. But after pulling it once, I became 'addicted', and I felt very proud. Later, everyone decided that every night during the peak of tourists' travel, they would come out to 'pull live' and go to the ice and snow world, Central Street, polar pavilion and other attractions with more tourists, and one car could transport twenty or thirty people for free every day. Mr. Yao posted his experience on social media, and as a result, he received private messages from more than 100 citizens, all of whom said that they also wanted to join the team to serve tourists. This made Mr. Yao also feel very moved, "I feel that our Harbin people are really united"!
Many businesses also took action and took the initiative to become city promotion officers.
The "time-honored" Modern Hotel, located on Central Street, has been almost always full since mid-December 2023.
"As a tourist card of Harbin, our hotel explains the history of Modern Hotel and the history of Harbin to guests for free 3 times a day. After learning about these histories, many guests prefer our city with distinctive cultural characteristics, and are more willing to take away some souvenirs rich in Harbin cultural characteristics. Deng Yibo, assistant general manager of Modern Hotel, said.
Many hotels in Harbin have also conducted uniform training for their staff, so that they can be familiar with local cost-effective scenic spots, routes, popular food outlets and other information, so that they can provide travel advice to tourists at any time. "I played in Harbin for 8 days, the first few days I played according to the strategy I prepared in advance, and the next few days almost all listened to the advice of the hotel to play, unlocking a lot of less well-known attractions in Harbin. Mr. Ma, a tourist from Chengdu, Sichuan, said that because it was a family of 7 people traveling, the suggestions given by the hotel staff also fully took into account the needs of the elderly and children, and the recommended itinerary was not tired at all, so that their whole family had a very happy time, "Harbin is not only beautiful, but also very enthusiastic."
Source: People's Daily Overseas Edition