China pays out bonus to world tourism

Beijing:With the week-long National Day holidays around the corner, many Chinese tourists are ready to travel overseas. According to information from various travel agencies, Chinese tourists are turning their eyes to more countries and regions instead of just focusing on popular destinations.

Their favorite travel destinations include Hong Kong, Macao, South Korea, Japan, Southeast Asian islands, Italy, India, Turkey, and Dubai. Chinese tourists have visited more than 100 countries and regions.

China’s rapidly growing outbound tourism has made significant contributions to global tourism and even economic recovery.

Last year, Chinese tourists made nearly 70.3 million overseas trips, and their consumption during the trips amounted to 69 billion U.S. dollars, only after their U.S. and German counterparts. China’s outbound tourism market, which is 1.2 times that of the United States and 3.5 times Japan’s, is expected to be the world’s largest in the near future.

Instead of restricting outbound tourism after the 2008 global financial crisis, China has promoted the orderly development of its outbound tourism to help destination countries’ tourism industries out of the crisis. According to a report by China Tourism Academy, China’s outbound tourism contributed 30 percent to the over 4 percent year-on-year increase in the number of international tourists in 2011, becoming a stable driving force behind the prosperous development of the world tourism industry. China’s outbound tourism has become a stable growth pole in the world tourism industry.

The current global economic uncertainty makes China’s outbound tourism even more important. The country’s outbound tourism is influencing the direction of global tourism. Many countries have taken Chinese tourists as a focus of their long-term tourism polices, adopted visa facilitation measures, and developed tourism products catering to Chinese tourists.

In addition to giving out these “tourists red packets,” China should enhance its right to speak at the world tourism and make the countries of destination fully understand the diversified needs of Chinese tourists. With the expansion of outbound scopes and the increase of outbound frequency, the tourism demands also become diversified. In addition to sightseeing and shopping, Chinese tourists more hope to experience the life of local people and the local cultural atmosphere. Some countries of destination unilaterally equate the outbound tourism of Chinese tourists with shopping, exaggerating consumption while ignoring other needs. Therefore, the destination countries should further improve the reception conditions, provide humanized service system and develop diversified travel contents especially vacation and leisure products to attract Chinese tourists.

Compared with the international influence of China’s outbound tourism, its tourism industry is still lack of authority in the order of international tourism. The situation should be changed as soon as possible. The tourism industry of China not only should enhance the right to speak on making international tourism rules including the international tourism cooperation, the economic statistics of tourism, the trade barrier of tourism service and low-carbon tourism, it should also strive to gain the rights of price coordination, rule-making, order maintenance and organization and development.

Chinese tourism enterprises should take advantage of outbound tourism to open the overseas markets, giving service to Chinese tourists and improving the international competitiveness of Chinese tourism. Some tourism experts said that China can learn from Japan to recover the expenditures of Japanese tourists in the countries of destination by establishing Japanese enterprises there. Going out is the best way for Chinese tourism enterprises to solve the tourism deficit.Source: People’s Daily online