China has reopened to tourists. The hardest part is getting there.

When the Chinese government announced last month it would fully reopen its borders to foreign travelers, the news came as a shock of relief to the millions of overseas Chinese immigrants who have been separated from their relatives since 2020.

But a stream of visitors is yet to come. Many people struggle to even book a plane ticket, hampered by high prices and a lack of direct flights.

Liu Wei, 62, who lives in San Diego, recently spent hours at a local travel agency filling out a stack of paperwork for obtaining a long-term visa to China. After weeks of searching for a flight, she bought a ticket for later this month to reunite with her sisters in the northeastern port city of Dalian. Round-trip business class tickets from San Diego to Dalian cost between $6,000 and $10,000, she said, double what she usually paid before the pandemic.

“I miss the choice and the freedom to go back and forth,” says Ms. Liu, who used to go to China every summer. “It’s such a tragedy for us that we can’t go back to our own country.”

For nearly three years, China enforced some of the world’s toughest travel restrictions, largely closing its borders to business travelers, tourists and relatives of Chinese nationals. The ruling Communist Party enforced a “zero Covid” policy and sought to eradicate the coronavirus with lengthy lockdowns and mass testing.

Foreign visitors who managed to enter China, sometimes had to quarantine for up to two months at their own expense. Some travelers even had to undergo a Covid anal swab, prompting protests from governments outside China.

China’s isolation had broad ripple effects. Universities entered into academic exchanges with the mainland and multinationals shifted their supply chains to other countries. The millions of Chinese immigrants overseas — in countries such as the United States, Britain, Canada and Malaysia — suffered the heaviest emotional cost of not being able to return home to care for ailing parents or bury relatives who died during the pandemic.

In December, China abruptly ended its “zero Covid” policy and soon began easing border restrictions, lifting quarantine requirements for international arrivals. The following month, business travelers were allowed to return on special visas.

The biggest barrier fell last month when the Chinese government resumed issuing tourist visas. China has also said it would reinstate 10-year visas suspended during the pandemic, facilitating travel for many foreign visitors.

In a sign of pent-up demand, just after the Chinese government announced its easing restrictions, searches on Expedia.com for travel from the United States to mainland China rose about 40 percent from a month earlier, according to data from the online travel organization. company.

Jessie Huang, who lives in Jersey City, NJ, hopes to visit China this summer, but is struggling to find tickets under $2,000. Ms. Huang, 52, has not seen her 86-year-old father, who lives on an island off the coast of Shanghai, for seven years. She was due to visit in early 2020 after he suffered a stroke.

Ms. Huang has kept in touch with him through WeChat, the Chinese messaging app. She sometimes feels heartbroken after their talks, feeling that each passing year is getting harder for him.

“I just miss my family,” she said.

Prices have remained high, in part because airlines have been slow to ramp up their flights to China. Globally, the number of flights to China in March was only about a quarter of the number in the same month in 2019, according to Cirium, an aviation data provider.

Routes between the United States and China, the world’s two largest economies, have been capped due to geopolitical tensions. During the pandemic, the two rivals have suspended each other’s flights in a political tussle, and airlines need the approval of both countries’ aviation authorities to expand routes.

US and European airlines are not as eager to resume all their prepandemic flights to China, according to aviation analysts. Since invading Ukraine more than a year ago, Russia has banned US and European airlines from flying through its airspace, meaning flights to China now require longer routes with more fuel and flight crew.

US carriers have lobbied in Washington to force Chinese airlines, which still fly over Russia, to use the same routes as their US competitors, arguing they have an unfair cost advantage.

A spokesman for the US Department of Transportation has not commented on when routes to China might increase.

Direct flights between the United States and mainland China are hard to come by. Last month, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines both resumed direct flights to Shanghai from hubs in Detroit, Seattle and Dallas, but only a handful of times a week. United Airlines flies direct from San Francisco to Shanghai four times a week. None of the airlines has direct flights between the United States and Beijing.

Aviation analysts say airlines are also hesitant to add flights when other hurdles dampen demand for flights to China.

A negative PCR test within 48 hours of departure is still mandatory for citizens of many countries to enter China. And with the sudden changes in China’s border policies, consulates around the world are struggling with the visa paperwork required for all foreign travelers to and from China.

Another factor that has slowed the recovery of flights to China is the fact that before the pandemic most of them were filled with Chinese tourists returning home. About 20 percent of China’s passports expired during the pandemic, according to data from consulting firm McKinsey, resulting in long waits for renewals that have slowed the recovery of outbound travel.

But the gates are slowly opening.

According to Ctrip, a Chinese online travel agency, group travel bookings for a vacation in China surged in early May. The top destinations were Thailand, Egypt and Switzerland, Ctrip said.

Right now, the visitors who can most afford to fly to China are business travelers, who have crammed luxury cabins to the mainland.

China has rolled out the red carpet for foreign corporate officials as part of an effort to revive its economy after years of Covid lockdowns. Dozens of CEOs, including Apple’s Tim Cook, flew to Beijing last month to attend the China Development Forum, where China’s newly elected Premier Li Qiang pledged that “the door to China’s opening will widen.”

Many executives are eager to visit employees and suppliers for the first time since 2020.

A February survey of 43 US companies found that 50 percent of CEOs planned to visit China in the first half of this year, according to the US-China Business Council, a China trade group.

“The Chinese government has issued some signals of support for private companies, but at the same time it is a tense geopolitical environment,” said Jack Kamensky, a senior director of the Business Council.

Some entrepreneurs were more hopeful about China’s reopening.

For more than a decade, Keith Collea, a film technology entrepreneur, worked in the nascent Chinese film industry on films such as the 2014 action movie ‘The Monkey King’. His latest project, supplying visual effects equipment to Chinese amusement parks, was halted when he during a trip to Los Angeles in 2020 the country was locked out.

Now Mr. Collea is planning a long-awaited return. He was convinced that his projects would resume once he was reunited with his former investors and partners.

“You don’t do business in China over the phone from the United States,” he said. “You have to sit with people, you have to go to dinner parties, you have to drink a lot. That is where you have to invest and build relationships.”

Claire Fu contributed research.