The 9th Shanxi Tourism Development Conference held in Datong of north China's Shanxi Province during June 26-28 cast spotlight on how the ancient city turned eyes on innovation to invigorate its cultural tourism sector. Compared with the past, this year's conference prioritized particularly supply side innovation and established platforms for cooperation between cultural tourism service demanders and leading suppliers to boost various innovative cultural tourism programs. More than 100 innovative cultural tourism institutions such as China Oriental Performing Arts Group and related businesses attended the conference as the suppliers together with the service demanders in excess of 100 ones comprised mainly of major scenic areas and related leisure blocks operators. Zhang Qiang, the city mayor, said Shanxi employed supply side innovation as an effective means to spur high-quality development of cultural tourism in recent years and accumulated lots of experience in forming a new development pattern for local cultural tourism industry characterized by new scenic spot experience, business layout, cultural brands and marketing modes. On the Tuesday's opening ceremony, Shanxi's culture and tourism department initiated jointly with its peers from Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and Inner Mongolia their strategic cooperation in coordinated cultural tourism development. Four cities including Dalian, Dali, Datong and Daqing signed agreements for sister-city coordination and cooperation to further shore up cross-region development of cultural tourism. As an important embodiment of its integration into the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and results of crafting a regional cultural tourism hub, tourists from Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and Inner Mongolia contributed over 60 percent of external tourists for Datong, according to the China Datong tourism development index report (Jan.-May, 2023) released by China Economic Information Service. Boasting abundant cultural and tourism resources, Datong thoroughly exploited these in vitalizing tourism with culture and poured great efforts into ancient city protection and restoration, scenic area facilities construction, cultural tourism products supply and multiple business formats integration. Under such practices, average tourist satisfaction score for Datong kept improving and rose by 0.6 point from 2022 to 4.56 points in the first five months of 2023. Original link: https://en.imsilkroad.com/p/334822.html SOURCE: Xinhua Silk Road Image Attachments Links: Link: https://iop.asianetnews.net/view-attachment?attach-id=441360 Caption: Photo shows the opening ceremony of the 9th Shanxi Tourism Development Conference.