A few visitors enter the largely empty Ocean Park in Hong Kong on September 10. Photo: VCG

China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) is likely to have a chilly time during the upcoming National Day holidays, which are also called Golden Week, in its already declining tourism sector due to persistent political unrest. 

Nearly half of the hotels in Hong Kong have halved their room rates during the upcoming week-long National Day holidays beginning on October 1, in the hope that they can attract tourists from the Chinese mainland, according to a report by hk01.com on Wednesday.

For example, search results via travel booking agencies showed that a luxury room in the five-star hotel Royal Plaza Hotel in the Mongkok area cost more than 1,800 yuan ($254) per night during the Golden Week when searched in August. However, the rate was just 700-800 yuan per night on Wednesday.

Currently, the occupancy rates of Hong Kong's hotels for the week-long holidays are only 30 percent, according to Nerine Yip Lau-ching, secretary-general of the Hotels, Food and Beverage Employees Association in Hong Kong, chinanews.com reported on Wednesday.

During last year's National Day holidays, nearly 1.2 million tourists from the mainland visited Hong Kong, an increase of 30 percent on a yearly basis, official data showed. 

About 70 percent of the hotels in Hong Kong tended to be booked in advance and room rates usually rose by 5-8 percent during previous Golden Week holidays, said the report.

Timothy Chui, executive director of the Hong Kong Tourism Association, told the Global Times that nearly all of the tour guides in Hong Kong have shut down their businesses as arrivals from the mainland plummeted over the past two months amid the ongoing unrest.

"In the past, there were 200 to 300 tours from the mainland on average per day, and now the number has slid to eight to 10 per day, which has seriously affected the lives of the guides," said Chui.

A survey by the Hotels, Food and Beverage Employees Association showed on Tuesday that 77 percent of the respondents in Hong Kong's hotels said they have been forced to take unpaid leave of up to three days, 46 percent said their incomes have been or will be affected by the high vacancy rates, and 43 percent predicted their hotels are likely to reduce the number of employees.

Labor force statistics showed on Tuesday that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in Hong Kong held steady at 2.9 percent from June to August 2019, unchanged from the previous reading. However, total employment was slightly lower than the level a year earlier, said Law Chi-kwong, the secretary for labor and welfare of the HKSAR.

The unemployment rate in the retail, accommodation and catering services sector reached 4.6 percent, highest among all sectors and a record since the June-August period in 2017.

Multiple trade unions in Hong Kong said that employees are forced to take unpaid leave, and workloads and business turnover have fallen,  according to a statement that the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions sent to the Global Times.

The ongoing violence in Hong Kong has greatly damaged its tourism sector, department stores and hotels and the only wish of the labor force is to restore social order, said the statement.