Global Tourism Economy Forum • Heilongjiang 2025 To be Held on December 15 - 17, 2025

New Quality Productive Forces: Powering the Global Tourism Economy

HARBIN, China, Dec. 5, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The Global Tourism Economy Forum ("GTEF" or "Forum"), an international platform dedicated to promoting the sustainable development of the global tourism economy, will hold its 2025 edition from December 15 to 17 in Harbin, Heilongjiang province. Under the theme "New Quality Productive Forces: Powering the Global Tourism Economy", the Forum will gather over 1,000 guests from five continents and more than 30 countries and regions, including the Secretary-General of UN Tourism, heads of international organizations, government officials, ministers of culture and tourism, executives from Fortune Global 500 companies, renowned entrepreneurs, and experts. Together, they will forge a new stage for open cooperation and jointly chart a future blueprint for the global tourism economy.

Launched in 2012 in the Macao Special Administrative Region, GTEF is an annual summit that has successfully held ten editions to date, attracting over 14,000 participants from more than 90 countries and regions. It has partnered with 44 countries and 13 Chinese provinces and cities to promote cultural and tourism brands, serving as a vital bridge linking China with the world. This year, the Forum is venturing beyond Macao for the first time to the "Ice City" of Heilongjiang, a milestone that reflects the province's growing influence in the cultural tourism sector, and the steady expansion of its international cooperation network.

In recent years, Heilongjiang has championed the development of its unique cultural tourism sector, capitalizing on emerging opportunities. The province has successfully harnessed its ice and snow appeal and innovative spirit to establish a diverse industry ecosystem — encompassing the ice-snow economy, winter sports, eco-tourism, and wellness retreats — all strategically tailored to local strengths and powered by new quality productive forces. Through its two "100-day tourism promotion campaigns", which promoted the province as a cool haven for summer, and as classic ice-snow destination during winter; it has since expanded its cultural and tourism offerings from seasonal popularity to year-round vibrancy and achieved remarkable results. In 2024, Heilongjiang welcomed a cumulative of 282 million tourist visits, a year-on-year increase of 29.1%; with its total tourism spending reaching 370.12 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 67.1%. International visitor arrivals surged to 1.2 million, a year-on-year increase of 95.4%, while inbound tourism spending reached 13.44 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 101.5%. These figures indicate strong and continuous momentum across both scale and quality in the cultural tourism market, demonstrating the dynamism of China's high-quality tourism development to the world.

Harnessing this forward drive, this edition of GTEF, as an influential annual global gathering for the culture and tourism sector, is structured around Heilongjiang's year-round, all-region tourism model and industrial innovation. The Forum features four key pillars: "Ice-Snow Economy & Industrial Innovation", "Cultural Empowerment & Brand Building", "Investment Leadership & Project Development", and "Cross-Border Collaboration & Cooperation Opportunities", with the goal of connecting Heilongjiang with high-quality resources and innovative impetus from across the globe. The agenda will include opening and closing ceremonies, keynote speeches, roundtable discussions, cultural tourism showcases, and a Heilongjiang Province Investment Promotion Session. These sessions are designed to establish a high-caliber international platform for domestic and international participants and enterprises, facilitate the business matching of premium projects, and promote the organic integration of the global tourism economy's innovation and industrial chains.

The Forum's dates also coincide with Heilongjiang's winter season "100-day tourism promotion campaign". Forum guests will be invited to tour Harbin's landmark attractions and development projects, gaining a firsthand look at the unique appeal of China's famous ice-and-snow tourism as well as the dynamic achievements of its cultural tourism sector.

About the Global Tourism Economy Forum
The Global Tourism Economy Forum (GTEF) is a world-class platform for exchange and cooperation dedicated to advancing the sustainable development of the global tourism industry. As a globally recognized annual flagship summit, it brings together high-level representatives including government officials, industry leaders, experts, and renowned entrepreneurs to discuss opportunities, challenges, and cutting-edge trends in the cultural and tourism sectors. The Forum helps global enterprises in tourism economy diversify their investment and cooperation channels by establishing cross-regional resource integration mechanisms to further promote high-quality development of the world tourism economy.

Since its inception in Macao SAR in 2012, the Forum has invited over 700 globally renowned speakers from 90 countries and regions, alongside more than 14,000 participants including heads of state, ministers, business leaders, and experts. With participation from over 1,400 prominent domestic and international media outlets, GTEF has reached a global audience of more than 1.63 billion people, generating accumulated media value exceeding $600 million. Over the past decade, 44 partner countries and 13 Chinese featured provinces and cities have leveraged the Forum's international platform to promote their cultural and tourism brands and share investment and cooperation opportunities, establishing GTEF as a vital bridge linking China with the world. The Forum's global impact, influence, and commercial value have been highly recognized by domestic and international government bodies and organizations. It was included as a key initiative in the State Council's "14th Five-Year Plan for Tourism Development," and UN Tourism explicitly pledged in 2018 to fully support GTEF in becoming the "Davos Forum of the Global Tourism Industry."

For more details and latest updates regarding the Forum, visit https://gte-forum.com/en/homepage/index.html as well as the official GTEF social media accounts.

** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **

Global Tourism Economy Forum • Heilongjiang 2025 To be Held on December 15 - 17, 2025

SHENZHEN, China, April 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- On March 30, Delonix Group presented two new initiatives at its 2026 strategy conference: Genie AI, embedded in its Betterwood App, and a customer experience framework known as the Heavenly Stems & Earthly Branches Model.

Individually, they resemble product and service upgrades. Taken together, they suggest something more structural: an attempt to replace the logic on which the hospitality industry has operated for decades.

For most of its modern history, the sector has been governed by a simple equation—growth through physical expansion. More rooms, better locations, higher occupancy. Scale was both strategy and moat.

That equation is beginning to break.

Chairman Zheng Nanyan framed the shift not as cyclical, but structural. The convergence of maturing consumer expectations and rapidly deployable AI systems is eroding the effectiveness of asset-led growth. Standardization, once a tool for efficiency, now produces indistinguishable experiences. Capital intensity, long tolerated, is becoming a constraint. 

What is emerging in its place is not a more efficient version of the same model, but a different organizing principle altogether: demand, not supply, as the system's point of origin.

From Capacity to Interpretation

In this emerging model, the central problem is no longer how to build and fill capacity, but how to interpret and respond to fragmented, real-time customer intent.

This is where Delonix is positioning Genie AI.

Unlike most applications of AI in hospitality—which tend to sit at the interface level—Genie AI is designed to sit in the middle of the system, between intent and execution. It does not simply respond to requests; it structures them.

A guest interaction—whether through app input or voice—is translated into a sequence of executable tasks, routed through a centralized decision layer, and distributed to the nearest available human resource, before feeding back into the system as data.

The technical architecture is not unprecedented. What is notable is the ambition to make it foundational.

If it works as intended, service ceases to be a function of individual responsiveness and becomes instead a property of the system itself. Variability, historically managed after the fact, is designed out at the level of coordination.

In that sense, AI is no longer augmenting service. It is defining its boundaries.

Standardization Was the Solution. Now It Is the Constraint.

The industry's previous growth model depended on standardization: replicable rooms, predictable services, consistent delivery across locations. This enabled scale, but at the cost of differentiation.

As consumer expectations evolve, that trade-off is becoming less acceptable.

Delonix's response is not to abandon standardization, but to layer variability on top of it—systematically.

The Heavenly Stems & Earthly Branches Model introduces a framework in which products and services are no longer fixed configurations, but evolving modules. Customer interaction becomes an input into how the product itself is iterated over time.

The implication is subtle but significant.

Hotels are no longer static assets with service attached. They become adaptive systems, where the product is continuously reshaped by usage.

For customers, this promises a form of progression—an experience that accumulates rather than resets. For operators and investors, it suggests a shift from one-off capital deployment to ongoing, incremental reconfiguration.

In both cases, the underlying assumption is the same: value is not embedded in the asset, but generated through interaction.

Control Shifts to the System Layer

What ties these elements together is not technology alone, but control.

In the traditional model, control resided in assets—ownership, location, physical scale. In the emerging model, it moves upward, into the system layer that interprets demand, allocates resources, and continuously adjusts the product.

This shift has implications beyond efficiency.

A system that can interpret intent, coordinate execution, and learn from outcomes begins to set the terms of competition. The advantage no longer lies in having more assets, but in having a better system for deciding how those assets are used.

In that sense, AI is not just infrastructure. It is governance.

An Industry at the Edge of Repricing

China's broader push to integrate AI into industrial and consumer systems provides the backdrop for this shift. Policy frameworks such as the State Council's "AI+" initiative are accelerating deployment, but the more consequential changes are happening at the level of business models.

Hospitality is one of the more exposed sectors.

As the marginal return on physical expansion declines, and as customer expectations become more fluid, the industry is moving toward a repricing of what constitutes value. Scale, once the primary moat, is becoming easier to replicate and harder to defend.

What replaces it is still being defined.

Delonix's approach offers one possible direction: treating demand as a continuously generated input, and building systems capable of capturing and compounding it. Whether this model proves durable remains to be seen. But its premise is clear.

The future of hospitality may depend less on how hotels are built, and more on how they think.

About Delonix Group

Delonix Group is a leading international hospitality and experiential consumption group in the Asia-Pacific region. Ranked 14th globally, the Group partnered with Marriott International to launch the world's first dual-branded luxury property: MajesTang Hotel • A Tribute Portfolio Hotel, while independently creating MaisonLee, a Tang-inspired premium business travel brand. As one of the first Chinese hotel groups to expand overseas, Delonix has established a presence in high-potential markets such as Japan and Indonesia, now spanning more than 200 cities worldwide. Its portfolio encompasses Swiss-Belhotel, Artotel, Model J, hotel MONday, and other brands, positioning the Group at the forefront of building a new generation global platform for high-end hospitality and culturally immersive travel.

** This press release is distributed by PR Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **

When Demand Becomes the System: Delonix and the Rewriting of Hospitality's Operating Logic