Chinese Tourists Are Staying Close to Home. Paris and New York Are Hurting.

For Ma Liang, a travel agent in Chengdu, China, bookings for overseas group travel are nearly full. Demand for travel outside of China is so low that many services have been cut, from flight routes to excursions at the famous sights and shopping districts of cities like Paris, Rome, and New York—where throngs of Chinese used to roam in hordes, spending $255 billion in 2019, and becoming the lucrative cohort internationally. As of December, the capacity of flights leaving and entering China had reached just over half of the same period in 2019, according to flight analytics firm OAG Aviation Worldwide.