Citing defense reasons, Marianas Visitors Authority chairman David Sablan said the movement of Chinese tourists will be confined only to Saipan and Tinian.<\/p>\n
Sablan made this announcement following a call from the Pacific Asia Travel Agency to take caution in approaching the Chinese tourism market to ensure that the islands attract only high quality travelers.<\/p>\n
\u201cChinese tourists will not be allowed beyond Saipan and Tinian in the interest of defense,\u201d Sablan told MVA members during a meeting on Tuesday. He however refused to elaborate, apparently in consideration of the sensitive nature of diplomatic relations between China and the CNMI.<\/p>\n
The Commonwealth is scheduled to receive from the Chinese government this month the sought-after approved destination status. The ADS would allow the islands to conduct a more aggressive marketing campaign in China, which is projected to be the next biggest tourism market in the world.<\/p>\n
According to PATA, China sent out 30 million travelers in 2004, a huge leap from the 4.5 million outbound Chinese tourists in 1993. Even with the SARS outbreak and the Iraq war, an estimated 20 million Chinese tourists traveled abroad in 2003.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Citing defense reasons, Marianas Visitors Authority chairman David Sablan said the movement of Chinese tourists will be confined only to Saipan and Tinian.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}