Heilongjiang Provincial Tourism Investment Group recently opened a ticket reservation system for all the scenic areas in China’s northernmost Heilongjiang province free of charge, according to local officials.
 
They said it was a measure taken by the Heilongjiang government to safeguard tourists’ health during the novel coronavirus epidemic prevention and control period.
 
The system adopts a time-scheduled and interval method to regulate the numbers of tourists entering the sites in an orderly manner.
 
It requires all the visitors make a ticket reservation before visiting the scenic areas.
 
When the numbers of visitors reach 30 percent of the attraction’s maximum capacity, new visitors have to wait outside for other time slots.
 
Officials said the new system proved its efficiency during the May Day holidays, held on May 1-5.
 
Statistics from the Heilongjiang Culture and Tourism Department showed that there were 85 A-level tourist attractions in Heilongjiang province open during the holidays, 70 percent of which had adopted the ticket reservation system to regulate their visitors.
 
The total number of tourists booked through the system for the May Day holidays was 754,000.
 
Moving forwards, the reservation system will gradually expand a data connection with Heilongjiang’s smart tourism market supervision and public service platforms and major OTA（Online Travel Agency）platforms -- to provide support for observing development conditions of the tourism industry after the epidemic.