Chinese travelers are returning to Banyan Tree Holdings hotels, its founder told CNBC.
Christian Heeb| Prisma By Dukas | Universal Images Group | Getty Images
A dearth of Chinese travelers is nothing to “worry about,” said Banyan Tree Holdings founder Ho Kwon Ping.
“They’re definitely going to come back back,” he told CNBC’s Chery Kang on the Milken Institute’s Asia Summit on Wednesday.
“China is just a short lived blip,” he said. “Most of us within the hospitality industry, a 12 months or so ago, predicted that Chinese tourism would only begin to rebound around possibly this 12 months and even next 12 months.”
Nobody expected a fast turnaround from lockdown to mass travel, he added.
For Banyan Tree Holdings — which operates greater than 60 hotels in 17 countries — Ho said “Chinese tourism [is] coming back quite strongly.”
What’s missing are the “mass group tours, which give the numbers, but they do not come to our hotels anyway,” he said.
“So you might have so much more free individual travelers … they usually’re those who will pay the upper airfares and so forth.”
He’s also bullish on the tourism market inside China.
“The Chinese government made it very clear, they don’t desire to have a heavy investment-led growth, they need consumption-based growth and consumption equals tourism. And tourism, as any economist will let you know, has got the best form of trickle-on effect,” he said.
China’s property market
Ho also dismissed concerns concerning the turmoil surrounding China’s real estate market, which makes up about 30% of its economy.
“The banking system will not be going to collapse since it’s Chinese banks which might be lending money,” he said.
We’re comfortable with a China real estate story, because we had quite a lot of hotels in China which were all sold prior to the property bubble.
Ho Kwon Ping
Banyan Tree Holdings
“In order that’s why you see things like Country Garden … near to going bust, yet not going bust,” he said, referring to the Chinese property giant that narrowly missed a default.
As well as, “the proportion of the Chinese population that really still lives in modern housing will not be halfway near what it’s within the Western world. So there’s a whole lot of demand still.”
As to his company’s exposure to a Chinese real estate bubble, he said: “We’re comfortable with a China real estate story, because we had quite a lot of hotels in China which were all sold prior to the property bubble.”
Not only two superpowers
Ho said he believed Singapore, where his hospitality brand is headquartered, can assist soothe geopolitical tensions which have escalated between China and the USA.
“I believe Singapore can actually play an important role in attempting to make the U.S., the West particularly, understand that the rise of China is the rise of a whole civilization — and that it isn’t a zero-sum game where they’re attempting to rise to the extent of putting America and the West down.”
The Western psyche has been too absorbed by the Cold War, which was a zero-sum game, he said.
Though the West has been dominant for the last 300 years, one global dominant power will not be sustainable into perpetuity, he said.
“I believe we’re going back to what I call ‘Back to the longer term’ — like within the movie, where the world 50 years from now will consist of varied great civilizations,” he said.
“I take advantage of the word civilization because it isn’t about economics. It isn’t about military power, even politics [or] the concept of the one criteria by which it’s best to judge a rustic’s politics is whether or not it practices liberal democracy … I believe that is all changing.”
