Why has industrial tourism become the new hot trend in cultural and tourism?

Investing in stocks relies on Golden Kylin Analyst Reports, authoritative, professional, timely, comprehensive, helping you uncover potential thematic opportunities!

■  Yan Tao Xiang

From Beijing’s Shougang Park to Xiaomi Auto Factory, and then to Qingdao Beer Museum, industrial tourism projects are becoming new favorites in the cultural and tourism market. As the Qingming holiday approaches, industrial tourism has once again become popular in many regions.

In my view, as an important link promoting the coordinated development of culture, tourism, and industry, the surge in industrial tourism is not a passing trend. It results from a combination of industry transformation needs, policy guidance, and consumer upgrade trends.

From an industry perspective, the rise of industrial tourism is an inevitable choice for manufacturing seeking value breakthroughs. Industrial tourism transforms originally closed production sites and idle industrial relics into consumable cultural and tourism resources, opening new revenue channels for companies. Essentially, it reactivates the value embedded in fixed assets, achieving a leap from single production functions to a “production + service” hybrid function.

The value breakthrough brought by this transformation yields returns far beyond tourism-related income, including showcasing production processes to convey quality confidence to consumers; and gaining firsthand market feedback through interaction, providing important references for product iteration and targeted marketing.

During this year’s National Two Sessions, Lei Jun, a National People’s Congress representative and founder of Xiaomi Group, proposed accelerating the development of new industrial tourism formats and scenarios, focusing on improving project management capabilities, encouraging companies to innovate development models, creating benchmark projects, selecting demonstration scenarios, and significantly enhancing supply quality.

From a policy perspective, many regions have already cultivated industrial tourism as an important growth point for the cultural and tourism industry. Take Beijing as an example: the “Implementation Plan for Promoting High-Quality Development of Industrial Tourism in Beijing (2025–2027)” encourages industrial enterprises and cultural tourism organizations to develop resources such as factory workshops, industrial parks, industrial heritage sites, and museums, optimizing the quality of industrial tourism supply, and jointly creating industrial tourism destinations that integrate tourism, shopping, and experiences. By 2027, the goal is to reach 20 million annual visitors and 3 billion yuan in industrial tourism revenue.

Policy guidance and corporate practice are forming a virtuous cycle. The transformation of Beijing Shougang Park is a typical example. Data shows that in 2025, the total annual visitors to Beijing Shougang Park will exceed 14 million. This indicates that, with policy support, industrial tourism can achieve a win-win situation for both social benefits and economic gains.

From a consumer perspective, industrial tourism aligns with the changing demands of the experience economy era. When material consumption is fully satisfied, consumers begin to pursue deeper experiences that are more educational, participatory, and trustworthy. Industrial tourism offers exactly this possibility: seeing firsthand how a car is assembled, personally experiencing how a piece of ceramics is fired—these “see-and-do” real experiences build brand loyalty far more effectively than advertising.

Of course, high-quality development of industrial tourism still faces some practical issues: some projects focus more on construction than operation, hardware investments are large while content updates are slow, and repeat visitation rates are low; some companies equate industrial tourism simply with “touring passages and souvenir shops,” lacking in-depth experience design; safety management and reception capacity sometimes conflict. Behind these issues, there is a need to reconcile industrial thinking with service-oriented thinking. Industrial companies are accustomed to standardized production, while cultural tourism services require personalized experiences. Merging these two logics takes time and requires professional operational capabilities.

Looking ahead, the imagination space for industrial tourism is enormous. It will not be a fleeting trend but a long-term development trend driven by deep integration of manufacturing and service industries. For companies, industrial tourism is not just about welcoming visitors but also a business model transformation from “manufacturing products” to “managing users.” Whether they can seize this opportunity depends on their strategic vision to turn production scenes into brand assets.