About China Tourism Academy

China Tourism Academy

The China Tourism Academy (CTA; Chinese: 中国旅游研究院) is China's national tourism research institution, based in Beijing. Established in 2008, it serves as the government's tourism think tank: a specialist academy that studies tourism policy and strategy, tracks the tourism economy through its own data work, and publishes the annual reports by which officials, destinations and travel businesses judge how Chinese tourism is performing at home, inbound and outbound. The academy describes its role in terms of policy thinking, industry intelligence and academic leadership for tourism, and it also serves as the National Tourism Data Center, the data centre of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Its headquarters address is given as 9A Jianguomen Inner Street in Beijing, and its official website is ctaweb.org.

Because China is one of the world's largest domestic tourism markets and, in normal years, one of its largest sources of outbound travellers, the academy's numbers carry weight well beyond China. When the CTA estimates how many outbound trips Chinese residents will make, how fast inbound travel is recovering, or how much revenue a holiday period will generate, those estimates are reported by state media, industry publications and foreign destination marketers alike. This profile sets out what the academy is, how it was founded, how it is organised, who leads it, and what its best-known research actually says.

Founding in 2008

The China Tourism Academy was established on 6 June 2008 in Beijing. According to accounts of its creation, it was set up under Document No. [2007] 98 issued by the State Commission for Public Sector Reform, and it was directly affiliated with the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA), the State Council authority then responsible for tourism affairs. The timing mattered. China was about to host the Beijing Olympic Games, domestic travel was expanding rapidly with rising incomes, and outbound travel was growing fast enough to reshape tourism markets across Asia. A dedicated national research academy gave the tourism administration an in-house source of evidence and forecasts rather than relying only on administrative statistics and outside academics.

The academy's institutional home changed a decade later. The China National Tourism Administration was dissolved on 19 March 2018 as part of a broad reform of party and state institutions, and its duties were merged into the newly formed Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The academy continued its work under the new ministry, and its president, Dai Bin, is routinely described in official and university sources as president of the China Tourism Academy and director of the Data Center for the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. That dual identity — research academy and ministerial data centre — remains central to how the institution presents itself and how its output is used.

Leadership under Dai Bin

The academy's best-known figure is its president, Dai Bin. University biographies describe Dai Bin as holding a PhD in economics, as the founder of the Beijing Hospitality Institute, and as a nationally recognised teacher who receives the special allowance of the State Council. He has presided over many major and key national social science projects, and he has twice been awarded the UNWTO Ulysses Award for Innovation in Public Policy and Governance — recognition from the United Nations tourism body for work in public policy. His stated research fields are tourism concepts, tourism economy and tourism policy, and he is credited with more than 20 monographs, textbooks and collections and more than 500 papers and professional articles.

Dai Bin is also a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), and he uses that platform and regular media appearances to comment on tourism law and market development. During the 2026 Two Sessions, for example, he argued that China's tourism market had huge growth potential, recommended safeguarding travellers' rights and interests, and called for revision of the Tourism Law of the People's Republic of China and supporting regulations such as the Regulations on Travel Agencies and the Regulations on the Management of Tour Guides. His quarterly and annual reviews of the tourism economy, published under the academy's name, are among the most widely quoted Chinese-language assessments of the sector.

Organisation and research institutes

The academy is organised into academic and administrative divisions. Its academic work is carried out through four institutes, covering tourism policy and strategy studies, tourism industry and enterprise development, regional tourism planning and development, and international tourism development respectively. That four-part structure mirrors the academy's mandate: one institute looks at the rules and strategy that govern tourism, one at the businesses that supply it, one at how regions plan and develop destinations, and one at China's tourism exchanges with the rest of the world.

Beyond the four institutes, the academy has a network of affiliated and independently run subsidiaries and specialised bodies. Published descriptions list twelve such subsidiaries, including two branch offices, located in Kunming and Wuhan, and two targeted research centres devoted to tourism in Taiwan and to western China. Alongside them sit specialised institutions working on subjects including tourism theory, tourism standardisation, hospitality, market development and destination marketing, tourism safety and security, tourism impact analysis, urban tourism and tourism vocational education. The academy also works in partnership with universities and other research institutes; one account of its structure notes cooperation with leading institutions of higher education and other research bodies, and it has run joint work such as a tourism big data joint laboratory with the online travel company Ctrip.

Role as the National Tourism Data Center

The academy also serves as the National Tourism Data Center, a function dedicated to tourism research, data analysis and tourism promotion. In practice this means the academy conducts national tourism surveys, polls travellers about their intentions and satisfaction, and turns official and industry data into the forecasts and market readings that appear in its reports and press conferences. Its researchers, rather than outside commentators, typically present headline figures at its briefings: Yang Jinsong, director of the academy's international institute, presented its outbound and inbound recovery estimates at a 2024 news conference, and researcher Liu Xiangyan presented findings from its inbound tourism report in Beijing in 2019.

The data-centre role explains why the academy's output is so often statistical. Its reports estimate trip numbers, revenues and recovery rates against the pre-pandemic benchmark of 2019, and its holiday and quarterly readings are used by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and reported by state outlets as the authoritative picture of the tourism economy. Dai Bin's own job title, combining the academy presidency with direction of the ministry's data centre, underlines that research and official data work are deliberately joined in one institution.

Annual reports and flagship publications

The academy's flagship publications are annual. They include the Annual Development Report of China's Tourism and the annual report series on the development of China's outbound tourism, alongside reports on inbound tourism and specialist subjects. Its China Ice and Snow Tourism Development Report, for instance, reported that during the 2018–2019 ice and snow season the number of Chinese ice and snow tourists reached 224 million and ice and snow tourism income was approximately 386 billion yuan — figures that helped establish ice and snow tourism as a measured national market rather than a regional niche.

Its industry reporting can be equally detailed. The academy's 2020 Chinese Travel Services Industry Development Report, summarised for international readers by Dragon Trail International, divided the pandemic year into three stages: a total freeze on travel from 24 January to 12 March 2020, a period in which the Ministry of Culture and Tourism temporarily returned 80 percent of travel agencies' security deposits from early February, and a recovery stage that began when the ban on inter-provincial group travel was lifted on 14 July. The report identified live streaming and group chats as two forms of social media that had become especially important to China's travel industry during the pandemic. The academy has also jointly released work such as the 2020 Domestic Tourism Revival Big Data Report with the Ctrip Tourism Big Data Joint Laboratory, which found that 85 percent of tourists surveyed had taken part in cultural and leisure activities during the National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival holiday period.

Reading the tourism economy through crisis and recovery

The academy's public profile rose during the COVID-19 crisis, when its surveys and forecasts were among the few systematic readings of a collapsed market. In February 2020 Dai Bin told an online conference that China's tourism economy would prove strongly resilient; an academy survey found 71.5 percent of respondents would travel after the outbreak ended and everything stabilised, and 20.7 percent would travel as soon as possible. At the same time the academy estimated a 15.5 percent drop in domestic trips and a 17.6 percent fall in outbound trips for 2020, and a yearly decrease of 1.18 trillion yuan in domestic tourism revenue.

Its 2021 outbound travel year-end report, released on 22 November 2021, recorded that Chinese outbound travel had dropped by 86.9 percent in 2020 compared with 2019, and projected 25.62 million outbound trips for 2021 — a 27 percent increase on 2020 but just 17 percent of the 2019 level. The same report found that 82.8 percent of polled travellers said they would only go to an outbound destination with no COVID cases, and that the share saying they would travel with a tour operator on their next outbound trip had fallen by 37.79 percent compared with 2019. As recovery proceeded, the academy's forecasts turned upward again: for the first half of 2022 it projected tourism revenue of 1.71 trillion yuan, about 269 billion US dollars, and more than 1.9 billion domestic trips, after estimating 973 million domestic trips and 640 billion yuan in revenue in the first quarter of that year.

Inbound and outbound tourism research

Two of the academy's most cited research streams concern travel across China's borders. On inbound tourism, its reporting recorded that inbound trips to the Chinese mainland reached 141 million in 2018, up 1.2 percent year on year, with sector revenue of about 127 billion US dollars and expectations it would top 130 billion dollars the following year. Asia remained the main source of travellers, and the top sources of inbound travellers in 2018 were listed as Hong Kong, Macao, Myanmar, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, the United States, Russia and Mongolia. Dai Bin used the report's release to argue that visa policy detail mattered — pointing to 72- and 144-hour visa-free transit services, tax reimbursements and the need for more market-based inbound tourism enterprises.

On outbound tourism, the academy estimated that outbound visits exceeded 87 million in 2023, a twofold increase on the previous year and more than half the 2019 level, and projected a jump to 130 million by the end of 2024. It estimated inbound visits in 2023 had reached 60 to 70 percent of the 2019 figure, and judged that visits by residents of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan would fully recover while visits by foreign travellers would recover to about 50 percent of the 2019 level. Dai Bin linked further inbound growth to increased flights and optimised visa policies, and to practical improvements in communication, transportation, accommodation and payment services for international travellers.

Forums, case studies and industry exchange

Alongside publishing, the academy convenes the industry and showcases exemplary practice. It is associated with the China Tourism Group Development Forum; at the 2023 forum, held in Shanghai from 11 to 12 December 2023, the academy selected Sanya, the resort city on Hainan Island, as a model of tourism entrepreneurship and innovation for China in 2023, citing its pioneering destination development models. Sanya had established the Sanya Tourism Promotion Board in 2020 — described as the nation's sole dedicated agency for destination marketing and promotion — which evolved into the Sanya Tourism Board in 2023. The academy's role in collecting and publicising such cases is part of its stated position at the forefront of promoting policy development and international exchange in the tourism industry.

The academy also appears in specialist forums well beyond destination marketing. It was an organiser behind a China Summer Tourism Summit programme on sustainable tourism and climate change, where Dai Bin outlined the academy's interest and commitment in that field; the programme recorded that the China National Tourism Administration and the China Meteorological Administration had signed a strategic cooperation agreement in 2011, linking tourism planning to weather and climate services.

International cooperation

International exchange is built into the academy's structure through its institute for international tourism development, and its recent cooperation illustrates the range of that work. In September 2026 the academy and Nigeria's Tourism Development Authority (NTDA) agreed to deepen cooperation to attract more Chinese tourists to Nigerian destinations. NTDA Director-General Ola Awakan called for a structured China–Nigeria Tourism Market Development Programme to provide deeper insights into Chinese traveller trends and preferences, and advocated technical and capacity-building cooperation in tourism data and research, destination development, standards and institutional development. Dai Bin responded that Nigeria was richly endowed with cultural and historical resources, expressed the academy's readiness to establish a strategic partnership with the NTDA, and said the academy was willing to collaborate on establishing a Nigerian International Tourism Promotion Centre in China. Yang Jinsong of the academy, identified in that meeting as director of its Department of International Exchange and Finance, also attended.

Earlier international work recorded for the academy includes a 2013 partnership with the Italian marketing and communications firm Select Holding. Together with its outbound research — which tracks destinations from Macao, Hong Kong, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan to the United States, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Indonesia — this gives the academy a practical function for foreign destinations: it is both a source of data about Chinese travellers and a counterpart for destinations seeking to understand and attract them.

Public voice and significance

The academy's significance lies in the combination of roles that few tourism research bodies hold simultaneously. It is a policy think tank advising the ministry responsible for tourism, an academic institution publishing monographs and annual development reports, and a data centre whose surveys and forecasts set the terms of public discussion about the tourism economy. Its leaders speak in several registers at once: Dai Bin comments on holiday travel behaviour and revolutionary-site tourism as a market phenomenon, proposes tourism law reform as a CPPCC member, and presents recovery forecasts as a data official.

For readers outside China, the academy is best approached as the first port of call for how the Chinese state itself measures tourism. Its annual reports on China's tourism development and on outbound tourism, its inbound market reporting, and its quarterly tourism-economy reviews by Dai Bin — including his assessment that the tourism economy had passed through rapid decline, deep recession and rapid recovery and was entering a new stage of prosperous development — are widely cited precisely because they are the official research system's own account. Its website, ctaweb.org, with an English presence at eng.ctaweb.org, remains the primary public window on that work.