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Sanya Tourism

 Sanya, China -- Sanya, the southernmost seaside city in China and holiday hub of the island of Hainan, has long drawn Chinese tourists to its clean white sand and year-round balmy conditions. But only recently have luxury hotel chains started to see potential: Within the past 16 months, Ritz-Carlton, Mandarin Oriental and Banyan Tree have arrived, joining earlier arrivals Intercontinental, Marriott, Hilton and Accor. That's not to mention the Howard Johnson that became Sanya's biggest deluxe hotel when it opened its 1,360 rooms in December.

Local authorities tout Sanya as China's answer to Hawaii, and have borrowed elements from seaside destinations ranging from Thailand's Phuket to Mexico's Cancun to the French city of Cannes -- which inspired a plan, not yet in place, to restrict a beachfront road to bicycles and electric vehicles. 'We're still only at the beginning,' says Tang Sixian, the Sanya Tourism Development Board's deputy director.

Sanya had more than six million visitors last year, 12% more than in 2007 and about 30% more than in 2006, according to the tourism board. The city boasts of being China's 'forever tropical paradise' -- a status many of the Chinese visitors, men and women both, celebrate with tropical garb that might stand as the island's symbol: a loud floral shirt with matching knee-length shorts. For newly rich Chinese, the chance to indulge themselves at a five-star beach resort, while speaking their own language and enjoying familiar comfort food, is a powerful draw.

Ritz-Carlton spokeswoman Vivian Deuschl says the company chose Sanya 'because there are few resort areas in China, and [Sanya] is seen by many in the travel industry as having much of the appeal Bali has had over the years, especially for affluent Asians.' The Mandarin Oriental Sanya is the only property the company manages in mainland China so far, though it's developing projects in Guangzhou and Beijing; its Beijing hotel was to have opened this summer in the China Central Television tower that was ravaged by fire last February. 'Sanya is a very, very tourism-oriented city, and a lot of the big (hotel) names are there,' says the Sanya resort's spokeswoman, Rebecca Hui.

Sanya has proved popular with non-Chinese as well, notably from Russia, South Korea and Japan. Cruise lines added Sanya to their itineraries after the first phase of a passenger terminal, planned to be one of Asia's biggest -- and built on a manmade island created for that purpose -- opened in 2007.

Visitors from outside China do have to work harder to get to Sanya. There are charter flights from Russia (charter flights from England were abandoned after six months for lack of profit), but the only cities outside the mainland with scheduled direct flights are Seoul and Hong Kong. And the weak global economy has pinched the flow of overseas visitors. The number of Korean visitors plummeted during South Korea's recent economic woes. The Sanya Marriott Resort & Spa says its numbers of guests from Russia and the U.S. were each down more than 50% in the first quarter from a year earlier. But many hotels report a rise in Hong Kong visitors, for whom Sanya, just 600 kilometers away, is a reasonable minibreak destination in a tough economy. And the domestic travelers keep coming.

'We could survive easily with the mainland Chinese business,' says Gerd Knaust, general manager of the Mandarin Oriental Sanya. 'It's more than enough.' Hotels were packed during the Chinese New Year holidays in January, for example -- even though some hotels more than tripled their room rates.

Except for Sanya, Hainan isn't renowned as a magnet for tourists. Resembling a teardrop falling away from China's southern coast, the island, slightly smaller than Taiwan, was long known as a place of exile for political troublemakers. Its best-known native son was Charlie Soong, father of the famous Soong sisters, of whom one married Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen and another Gen. Chiang Kai-shek (the third settled for a rich banker). The island hit the news in 2001 when a U.S. spy plane made an emergency landing there after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet. Sanya itself raised its international profile by hosting the Miss World beauty pageant four times over five years starting in 2003.

Sanya's beach culture originated at Dadonghai, a congested strip of sand near the city center. A more recent crop of hotels, mostly Chinese-owned and operated but including a Holiday Inn and a Kempinski, has sprung up on the western outskirts of the city at Sanya Bay, a 20-minute drive from downtown on the road to the airport. But Sanya's grand strand lies half an hour by car to the east of the city at Yalong Bay. The Chinese navy controlled Yalong and kept developers away until the mid-1990s, but now 16 luxury hotels line a sparkling beach. The first was the Hong Kong-managed Gloria, which opened in 1995. International brands,