Incentives urged to woo Chinese visitors
Industry insiders have called for new incentives to appeal to Chinese visitors as several big-name cities in the United States and Europe count the cost of a fall in tourist numbers that has brought a corresponding fall in travel industry revenue.
Tori Emerson Barnes, executive vice-president of the US Travel Association, a nonprofit organization representing the travel industry, told China Daily that China used to be one of the fastest-growing markets for the US, with “Chinese visitors spending more on average than visitors from any other market”.
However, according to an August analysis by the association, visits from China to the US last year only recovered 30 percent of 2019 levels, while the overall overseas recovery stands at 73 percent.
Data from Statista showed that in 2023, just 850,000 Chinese visitors entered the US, and the number is lower than the 2.83 million visitors welcomed in 2019.
Chinese tourists are much loved by international businesses as they are among the biggest spenders.
In 2019, Chinese travelers represented the highest average spend per visitor, with each Chinese visitor spending an average of $11,849, the National Travel and Tourism Office, or NTTO, the agency within the US Department of Commerce that monitors tourism, found.
In New York City, about 8 percent of 14 million visitors in 2019 were from China, according to the New York City Tourism and Conventions Office. But only 390,000 were expected from China last year.
The pattern is also being repeated in other cities.
In 2019, 2 million Chinese visited France, spending more than 3.5 billion euros ($3.8 billion), according to the newspaper Le Monde. But in 2023, the figure fell to 1 billion euros.
“Chinese tourists are mainly welcomed by operators specializing in Chinese or Asian customers. Of course, due to the absence of the Chinese, they starved for three years, which is extremely long, extremely hard,” JeanPierre
Mas told Xinhua News Agency. He is president of Les Entreprises du Voyage, a travel agency association.
In the United Kingdom, Research by the Association of International Retail, or AIR, found in September that London is losing high-spending Chinese tourists as a result of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s tourist tax.
In 2021, VAT-free shopping was abolished for tourists. That made overseas visitors head to Italy, Spain and other destinations instead of the UK.
Paul Barnes, CEO of AIR, told The Telegraph of London: “If you want your economy to do well out of the international visitor sector, you really want to be appealing to the Chinese, and the one thing that appeals to the Chinese is shopping.”
Barnes from the US Travel Association said that as Chinese travel patterns shift in favor of more regional, shorter haul trips, barriers must be reduced to growth and “compete more aggressively to welcome visitors from critical source markets like China”.