A phone away from home: China urged to provide rental handsets to aid tourists
A think tank says low-end handsets, rentable at border checkpoints and pre-installed with local apps, could narrow ‘digital divide’ for visitors
A Chinese think tank is urging the country to offer foreign visitors domestically made phones packed with local apps at border entry points, allowing inbound tourists access to payment and reservation tools that devices made overseas often lack.
Inbound travellers should be able to borrow low-end 4G or 5G handsets near immigration checkpoints, such as airports, the Straits Urban Research Institute recommended in a commentary. The phones would come with eSIM cards plus pre-installed apps that could be used to show maps, process e-payments, book hotels and make emergency calls, it said.
“China’s inbound tourism market continues to recover, but international tourists still face a significant ‘digital divide’ in China,” according to the commentary posted Sunday on WeChat by the independent academic group, which focuses on macroeconomics, urban development and geopolitics.
The think tank cited surveys showing that more than two in three independent travellers from outside China said they were affected by “the inability to use mainstream domestic apps for booking and payment”.