Who doesn’t love Beijing in April?

Apparently, tourists from the United States, Japan, and Korea.

According to Xinhua, tourist visits from those countries were down 17.2 percent, 24.4 percent and 11 percent, respectively in April. Overall, Beijing experienced an overall drop of 5.3% in tourist visits, year on year, compared to 2007.

By way of explanation, Xinhua reasonably blames the decline on new visa restrictions(!), currency valuations and rising hotel costs in Beijing, while conceding “that the mid-March Lhasa violence was a minor factor in discouraging some foreign tourists from coming to Beijing.” It flat out denies that the international torch relay protests played any role at all.

Earlier this Spring, at the height of the Tibetan crisis, I had dinner with someone with almost two decades of experience in China’s international hotels. I asked this person whether the unrest would effect hotel bookings for the August Olympics. The response I received was roughly this: “If bad China news persists for more than three weeks in the international press, we begin to see canceled bookings. If you have more than six weeks of bad news, people stop making bookings at all.”

This explanation strikes me as reasonable, and certainly not something that would apply to China, alone. Certainly, other major international tourist destinations – say, France – would be negatively effected by bad press (warranted or not). What’s unusual, though, is that Beijing’s bad news – and decline in tourists – is happening on the verge of an Olympics designed to drive tourist numbers higher.

Four years ago, Athens also suffered from a decline in tourists in advance of the games (and empty seats during the games), but that decline was largely driven by reports of incompetent Olympic planning – not political unrest (not to mention, natural disasters).

Of course, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if the Beijing Olympics belonged to the Beijingers more than the tourists. And, as unlikely as that seems, it could even serve the PR machinations of BOCOG, which – post-earthquake – seems more determined than ever to sino-fy the games.

One final point. According to someone else involved in China’s hotel industry, the vast majority of five-star hotel bookings for August are “block bookings” made for VIPs who don’t make the same sorts of travel decisions as regular tourists. According to this person, if, for some reason, the VIPs were to start pulling out of attending the games, Beijing’s high-end hotels would face a vacancy crisis that would likely drive prices down by half.