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« September 2010 | Main | December 2010 » October 8, 2010Coming To a City Near You: The Chinese Tourist
And, like most things in China, when the government puts its weight behind an initiative it often succeeds beyond expectations. Long-distance trains from the eastern Tier one cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou were packed with workers making the trek back home to visit families, 8.3 million on Oct. 1 alone, the start of the National Day Golden Week. That's up 20 percent from last year. Drivers took to the road in unprecedented numbers, too, with the government logging more than 474 million individual road trips by car and bus. The Beijing traffic control bureau reported a gridlock on the Beijing-Tibet Highway that lasted from 2 pm to 8 pm on Sunday, with vehicles stretching back nearly 10 kilometers. The Forbidden City was mobbed with record crowds of Chinese tourists at more than double the daily capacity of 60,000. Check out what it looked like in the photo above. More than 600,000 Chinese visited Hong Kong over the holiday, a record, and queued up on long lines at high-end malls to fill suitcases with luxury goods, available in Hong Kong at 30 percent lower prices than on the Mainland. The proof points go on and on, and these eye-popping travel numbers are part of a long-term trend that is seeing the emergence of the Chinese tourist on the national and world stage as perhaps the most influential force in the global travel industry. The Golden Week concept, created in 1999 by the central government, mandates three days of paid holidays for Chinese workers to celebrate National Day, commemorating the creation of the modern Chinese republic on Oct. 1, 1949, and the Chinese Lunar New Year in January or February. The surrounding weekends are also re-arranged, so workers always have seven continuous days of holiday. In the 10 years since the policy innovation, Chinese travelers have taken to the road and skies with considerable passion and increasingly are crossing international borders. Sometimes statistics rather than anecdote tell the clearer story, and this is such a case. Consider: • China's Tourism Academy estimates that 54 million tourists will go abroad this year from China, up from 47 million in 2009. • Relaxed visa rules effective July 1 will soon make travelers from China Japan's biggest tourist group, topping 10 million per year. Those visitors spend more per traveler than those from any other nation, and Chinese tourists are already the largest per capita spenders in France. • The China International Travel service (CITS), the nation's ubiquitous storefront travel agency, enjoyed record revenue growth and profit during the first half of 2010, with income of $375 million USD, up 80 percent year-on-year. • China's big three airlines -- China Air, China Easterm and China Southern -- also reported record profits and growth during the first six months of 2010, as their lucrative international flights were packed to capacity. As if the two National Day periods aren't enough to continue driving this unprecedented growth in tourism by Chinese citizens, the government is weighing the creation of a new holiday specifically and literally intended to get people to travel. The new National Tourism Day will likely make its debut next year, once the government figures out on what day the holiday should fall. With extensive lobbying from various local governments across China , the outcome is far from certain. According to the China Daily, the factions breakdown this way: "Jiangsu province's Wuxi, wants the national tourism day to fall on March 29, the day famous Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) tourist Xu Xiake started traveling. "Zhejiang province's Ninghai, suggested May 19, when Xu started writing his travel books. (More than 5,000 volunteers in Ninghai county, Zhejiang province, advocate for national tourism day to be held on May 19, the day Xu Xiake, a famous ancient explorer, began his adventure from the county.>View China Daily image) "Meanwhile, Hunan province, proposed Dec 26, the day late Chairman Mao Zedong was born. "And Sichuan province, wants the day to fall on either July 5 or 15, when prominent leader Deng Xiaoping made important speeches about tourism. "Wuxi is the birthplace of Xu, who first mentioned Ninghai in his maiden travel book, while Chairman Mao was born in Hunan province and Deng in Sichuan." When the government asked the popular online portal, sina.com, to poll its visitors about potential dates, the site was deluged with more than 4.2 billion votes. Given that China has 1.3 billion people, the results suggested that those local Chinese governments had taken a creative approach to spurring support among their citizens. With so much economic reward at stake, the forces of fakery in China had been unleashed in an effort to market the respective dates. That incident aside, there's no questioning the genuineness of the travel boom in China. It is a trend that is certain to continue and will influence tourist destinations worldwide. The era of the Chinese tourist is upon us, and it's coming to a city near you. Posted by markhass at 12:31 AM CommentsArticle is very good, I like, I would definitely put it link to my friend, thank you for sharing. Posted by: ed hardy jeans at October 21, 2010 11:54 PM Fascinating article - the trend in tourism certainly does not appear to be stopping. A Neilson survey for Visa noted that Chinese tourists on average are planning at least 7 trips over the next two years - four of which will be international! Posted by: Lisa Levandowski at October 27, 2010 11:29 PM Post a comment| TrackBack |
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