Chinese tourists are traveling again, go for domestic, distant travel

Chinese tourists are raring to travel again.

But this time, the standard suspects — Venice, Paris and Madrid, for instance — aren’t their top picks.

As China’s reopening gains momentum after three years of Covid-19 restrictions, the country’s travel-hungry residents are emerging much modified, in line with the Chinese Outbound Tourism Research Institute, an independent consulting company based in Germany.

“The Chinese tourists we’ll welcome this 12 months and in the approaching years are very different from those that got here before,” Wolfgang Georg Arlt, founder and chief executive of COTRI, said at ITB Berlin, the world’s largest tourism trade fair.

In China as elsewhere, years of pandemic-induced lockdowns sparked a shift away from major tourist attractions toward “more nature-orientated, more outdoor-orientated tourism,” Arlt said. He highlighted the emergence of trends like camping and glamping, in addition to family-focused trips.

Perhaps more significantly, many Chinese holidaymakers are still exploring the treasure trove of travel opportunities in their very own country, he said.

“Within the three years of the closure of the country, everybody needed to travel domestically — including the wealthy people — which gave a lift to the domestic tourism industry,” Arlt said.

That might mark a big change within the international travel market, to which Chinese tourists are outsized contributors.

“It was once that if you happen to were a crucial person in China, you needed to travel internationally. For those who were traveling domestically, either you were too poor otherwise you were too silly to travel internationally,” Arlt added.

“This has modified now,” he said.

Plus “there was an improvement in the standard and number of the offers of domestic travel. So, for us, we now have to compete not only with other international destinations, we also must compete with the domestic market,” said Arlt, who can be director of the Meaningful Tourism Center, a Hamburg-based sustainable travel consultancy.

Chinese tourists made nearly 170 million outbound trips in 2019, in line with China’s National Bureau of Statistics.

In the primary half of that 12 months alone, their outbound travel spend surpassed $127.5 billion, a study from Chinese travel booking site Ctrip.com found.

This 12 months, Chinese outbound travel is forecast to get well around two-thirds of those 2019 highs, with around 110 million border crossings from China, in line with COTRI.

Nevertheless Hotel group Accor estimates around 3 in 4 Chinese travelers will remain throughout the country.

“We anticipate that 70% to 80% of the travelers will still stay inside China. Flight capability is just not yet at the degrees of 2019,” Karelle Lamouche, Accor’s global chief industrial officer, told CNBC Travel.

For the reason that country reopened its borders in early January, an absence of flight capability has left many would-be travelers stuck at home. Within the week from Feb. 6 to Feb. 12, international flights out of China recovered only 9% of their 2019 levels, with 63% of those flights operated by Chinese carriers, in line with data from Alibaba-owned travel booking site Fliggy.

Within the meantime, many Chinese residents have been beleaguered by delays in passport renewals and visa applications, in addition to some short-lived travel bans from countries corresponding to Japan and South Korea.

“Unless we now have the passports, unless we now have the visas,” we will not be China-ready, said Ralf Ostendorf, director of market management at tourism site visitBerlin.

Due to those shortcomings, countries that may accommodate Chinese travelers’ shifting needs have emerged as clear winners. Thailand, as an illustration, offers visas-on-arrival to totally vaccinated Chinese tourists who’ve travel insurance.

“Thailand becomes the highest destination for Chinese customers,” said Simeon Shi, chief strategy officer and head of corporate development at Fliggy, noting that Thailand welcomed 180,000 Chinese tourists from January to mid-February.

The country’s Deputy Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said last month that he expects as much as 15 million Chinese tourists to go to the country this 12 months — around half of all inbound arrivals.