China's ice and snow leisure tourism sector is expected to receive over 520 million visitors during the 2024-2025 ice and snow season, data from the China Tourism Academy showed this week.

The sector is estimated to be generating more than 720 billion yuan ($104.5 billion) in revenue during the period, marking it a main engine for winter tourism, the research institute said in a report.

Enthusiasm expands due to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, prompting growth of the ice and snow industry.

A tourist takes pictures at the Harbin Ice-Snow World theme park in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, January 5, 2023. /Xinhua

China's ice and snow tourism sector welcomed 344 million tourists during the last ice and snow season, raking in 474 billion yuan in revenue.

Thanks to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, policy innovations, and promotion by governments at all levels, the ice and snow tourism has injected vitality into traditional folk customs across the country, making the tourism options and consumption scenarios of the sector much more diverse, according to Dai Bin, president of the China Tourism Academy.

From 2016 to 2022, China invested about 2.88 trillion yuan in its infrastructure projects for ice and snow tourism. As of the end of 2022, nearly 9,000 relevant enterprises had registered in the sector. In 2022 alone, 1,460 were newly added, up 20.1 percent year on year, according to the report.