The 34th Shanghai Tourism Festival is held from September 16 to October 6, 2023. Adhering to the theme of "Festival for the People", this Tourism Festival will continue to proceed from Shanghai's most resourceful and advantageous aspects, promote integration of culture and tourism, highlight culture through tourism and develop culture and tourism together, strive to achieve high-quality integration and development of culture and tourism, better meet the new public demands for "quality, experience, diversity and safety" in culture and tourism consumption, help Shanghai become the number one city of inbound tourism in China, and accelerate its development into a world-famous tourism city.

Refresh and light up the world's living room to exhibit cultural integration

Shanghai is the window for the world to observe China. This Tourism Festival will actively integrate into the new development pattern, leverage the spotlight effect of festival celebrations to tell China's story and showcase the splendor of Shanghai, so that more overseas tourists get to know, look forward to and enjoy traveling in Shanghai. On the evening of September 16, the opening ceremony of this Tourism Festival was held at the confluence point of "a river and a creek", with the theme of "Refresh and Light Up the World's Living Room". It consisted of four chapters: "Welcoming the World", "Colorful Charm", "Abundance and Prosperity", and "Radiance and Brilliance". The float parade made a strong comeback after a two-year absence. Starting from September 16, it has successively debuted in the "five new cities" and 11 districts including Hongkou and Baoshan. During the National Day holiday, it will tour around Dishui Lake in Lingang and light up streets and alleys across the city. The Huangpu River cruise ship parade made a grand appearance at the opening ceremony of the Tourism Festival, while the Suzhou Creek cruise ship parade met the public for the first time on the second day after the opening ceremony. This year's Shanghai Tourism Festival showcases a more colorful, vibrant people's city, a more charming and attractive image of a great power and metropolitan, fully demonstrating to the world the vivid landscape and unique charm of Chinese-style modernization.

At the same time, this year's Tourism Festival has set up sub-venues in 12 cities across 5 provinces including Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangxi and Fujian. By expanding the "circle of friends" and empowering each other's prosperity and development of culture and tourism, it strives to give full play to Shanghai's culture and tourism as the central hub of domestic circulation. Themed floats of sub-venue cities will appear at the opening ceremony of the Tourism Festival, bringing quality culture and tourism offerings, and jointly promoting in-depth integration and development of culture and tourism. The new landscape where regional culture and tourism festivals promote and develop each other will allow more citizens and tourists to discover and experience the beauty and joy of different cities.

Conduct comprehensive cross-industry linkage to boost consumption through culture and tourism

This Tourism Festival will seize opportunities for the recovery of culture and tourism consumption, conduct cross-industry linkage with events such as the China Shanghai International Arts Festival, Shanghai International Dragon Boat Race and Shanghai Autumn Shopping and Tourism Season, while actively linking with relevant market entities in catering, business, sports, conventions and exhibitions, transportation, etc. It will roll out over 200 key events and thousands of culture and tourism products, innovate consumption scenarios, lead consumption fashion, optimize consumption experience, smooth consumption circulation and stimulate consumption vitality. Among them, the "Happy Cloud Shopping September 17" tourism consumption season will bring a number of popular tourism and cultural products from key destinations through online livestreaming and offline carnivals. Culture and tourism platform enterprises like Ctrip, Meituan, Douyin and Lvmama will launch various preferential products. Culture and entertainment platforms like the Ferris Wheel, Piaostar, FlashEx will plan a series of discounted performance tickets for the public. This year's Tourism Festival has also created urban culture and tourism IP such as "A River and Creek Tour", "Architectural Literacy", "Grand World of Performing Arts" and "Maritime Archaeological Study of the City", so that "appreciating museums and art exhibitions, watching good shows, reading architecture, studying urban archaeology" become premium choices for urban tourism. During the Tourism Festival, the Shanghai Urban Spatial Art Season will focus on "multi-space, multi-scene, multi-dimension", launching 20 exhibition areas. Street performers will construct cultural scenes with a sense of everyday life for the city around the theme of "In Shanghai, Meet You, Touch You". Events like the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Concert Series, Shanghai World Music Festival, The Bund Architecture Exhibition, Revival Art Festival will offer citizens and tourists distinctive culture and tourism delicacies.

Strengthen technological empowerment to develop new business formats of youth-oriented culture and tourism consumption

This year's Tourism Festival proactively embraces Generation Z and seizes the new track of the metaverse to enhance the youthfulness and vitality of cultural and tourism consumption. The Shanghai Tourism Festival float parade introduces an AR-based new experience for the first time. As learned, this AR float parade project came from leading domestic AR vendor Rokid. By integrating classic tourist attractions with urban cultural landmarks, 3D spatial videos, spatial photos, with a brand new perspective of digital integration of culture and tourism, it showcases the unique charm of the Shanghai Tourism Festival to the world. In addition, the Shanghai culture and tourism metaverse demonstration projects "The Wind Rises in Luoyang" and "Lost Pharaohs" will continue to provide citizens and tourists with the ultimate time travel experience beyond the senses and reality. Shanghai landmarks like Shanghai Tower, Oriental Pearl Tower, 1000 Trees, HKRI Taikoo Hui will launch light shows, VR pop-up stores, metaverse multimedia premiere exhibitions and other immersive new scenes. Enterprises like Baidu and Kichuang will hold large-scale immersive art exhibitions and research activities like the "AI Tourism Initiative" and "Exploring Classic of Mountains and Seas". In addition, online audiovisual platforms like Bilibili will also plan and launch a series of special events exclusive to the Shanghai Tourism Festival, making full efforts to create new online audiovisual consumption models and experiences.

Perspectives

As a pioneer of China's reform and opening-up and innovation-driven development, Shanghai is well-positioned and capable, and also responsible to develop itself into a high-level number one city of inbound tourism in China, and better leverage its diversion effect and radiation effect to boost China's inbound tourism market. International experience shows that large-scale festivals, events and competitions are often the "business cards" for a city's image promotion and "boosters" for attracting international tourists. Adhering to deep integration of culture and tourism, and highlighting its biggest characteristics of being "urban, comprehensive and international", the Shanghai Tourism Festival is motivated from within, breaks out of the circle through iterations, and creatively rolled out the 2021 "Architectural Literacy" and 2022 "Most Shanghai, Suzhou River" multimedia livestreaming events from Shanghai's most advantageous resources, garnering over 100 million views and participants. This explores new models and establishes new examples for national tourism festivals. With hundreds of events, thousands of products, tens of thousands of enterprises, and hundreds of millions of views this year, the Shanghai Tourism Festival will amplify the platform function of culture and tourism as the gateway of a traffic-based city and engine of service economy. This will boost Shanghai's development into a world-famous tourism city, the number one city of inbound tourism in China, and enable it to tell China's stories and showcase the splendor of Shanghai to the world!

Text & Images Source | Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism Official Website

Text | Hua Hongqi

Layout | Chen Yifan

Editor | Mao Haijun