Riding The Dragon: Connecting With Chinese Travellers

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Carolyn Childs has authored a white paper on China outbound for our friends at PATA. Download your free China report here where she talks about the latest changes and maturing of the market.

Tourism is known to economists as a ‘higher good’: the wealthier we become the more of it we do. This is nowhere more evident than in China. Over the last 37 years, the Chinese economy has grown more than 30 times its original size.

This extraordinary growth has powered a growth in tourism (both domestic and outbound) on an unprecedented scale. In 2012 some pundits were predicting that by 2020 more than 100 million Chinese would be travelling overseas. But that prediction came true in 2014!

In 2015, more than 130 million journeys were made by outbound Chinese travellers – with about half of those trips made beyond the Greater China region (Hong Kong SAR, Macao SAR and Chinese Taipei).

Whilst economic growth powered that to some extent, there was another factor. Previously isolated from the world, China became newly connected and government policy was favouring overseas travel as a form of soft power.

So the desire of Chinese travellers to see the world was a key driver of tourism – travel outranked every other activity for those enjoying ‘new wealth’ in 2014.

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Carolyn Childs

Carolyn has spent more than 25 years’ helping businesses achieve their goals by using research and other evidence to guide strategy and planning – mainly in the aviation, travel and tourism fields.She has worked in more than 35 countries on every inhabited continent and brings a detailed understanding of customers and how to connect with them. As well as running her own businesses, she has worked for organisations such as the International Air Transport Association, TNS (the world’s largest custom research company) and the Travel Research Centre.

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