During the National Day holiday Shanghai's cultural and tourism market was active. Shanghai's first metro-station citywide immediate refund point has opened at the Yuyuan station reception hall, embedding departure tax refund services in public metro space and giving overseas visitors a nearby, fast refund experience.
The new point complements the main refund site in the Yuyuan commercial area: visitors can walk between the scenic area, shops and the metro refund point within five minutes, forming a one-stop loop of sightseeing, shopping and refunds. Financial services at the site combine consumption, currency exchange and refunds.
Since the second-phase departure tax refund policy took effect, Shanghai has kept expanding the service and simplifying procedures to energise inbound consumption. Li Shuai, senior tax director of Shanghai Yuyuan Tourist Mart (Group) Co., said the company sees strong knock-on effects from metro refund services and will keep cultivating refund-enabled merchants, improving in-store guidance and multilingual navigation.
In recent years Shanghai has been the first in China to extend immediate refunds from shopping malls and commercial areas to hotels, bank branches, cultural venues and metro stations, building a network of 36 citywide refund points, 18 centralised refund points and numerous single-store points, so visitors can obtain refunds near any refund store in the city.
Shanghai also pioneered paperless departure tax refunds, moving the whole process onto mobile. The mobile service now integrates refund policies and electronic maps and is embedded in platforms such as Hushaoiyou, Easy Go and the WorldSkills app, which allows immediate refunds to fit into public spaces such as metro stations.
Awareness matters as much as convenience. The tax authority produced a bilingual refund map handbook linking key refund sites with popular landmarks and distributed it through 100 large hotels and 20 tourist information centres. During major international exhibitions and events, refund support follows: at the recent WorldSkills competition a temporary immediate refund point was set up, with portable smart refund devices and self-service machines on display.
These measures continue to release policy dividends. From January to September 2026, Shanghai's departure tax refund sales rose 52 percent year on year, refund application forms rose 2.7 times, immediate refund sales rose 1.4 times, and the number of registered refund stores exceeded 2,700.