Boston: a study in attracting Chinese visitors

Boston, like many US cities, is trying to increase Chinese tourism. It has the added benefit of being a major college hub, which it is using to entice Chinese students, and the city hopes, visits by their friends and families.

Visitors who go to Boston for education-related reasons make up the majority of Chinese tourists in the area, and the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau (GBCVB) is trying to ramp up efforts to keep increasing that market, said Patrick Moscaritolo, the bureau’s president and CEO.

“When you drill down into the number, it’s more than just Chinese students at our colleges and universities in Boston and Cambridge,” he said. “It’s also now turning out to be Chinese students at secondary schools, Chinese visitors that are coming for summer camps.”

Besides the students, Boston wants to attract their parents as well. Parents who drop off their children at summer camps, for example, might spend the week exploring Boston and the rest of Massachusetts, or travel around New England and other parts of the Northeast, before returning to pick up their children and heading back to China.

“Education is such a major part of what Boston and Cambridge offer. Another way to put it, to look at it from a marketing perspective, it is really the underpinning of the Boston and Cambridge brand, as it relates to Chinese visitors,” he said.

About a quarter of Chinese visitors going to Boston go for educational purposes, according to 2015 figures published by the US Department of Commerce. More recent figures are not available yet, but Moscaritolo estimates that the number has grown to approximately 28 percent for 2017.

The education category that visitors check off on their surveys can mean attending college in the Boston area, attending secondary schools and academies, short summer education programs or corporate training programs, he said.

There are roughly 20,000 Chinese students attending school in Boston, a number that has seen double-digit growth in the last decade.

Boston gets roughly 209,000 Chinese visitors, just below the 215,000 who visit from the United Kingdom. It set a goal to get 500,000 visitors by 2021, which Moscaritolo said he expects the city can accomplish.

Boston held China-friendly seminars for participating member organizations and retailers in December and is working to partner with colleges and other education institutions to strengthen its Chinese programs.

“Colleges and universities are such drivers of Chinese visitors, [so] part of our plan is to build programs with the colleges and universities, and within the colleges and universities with the Chinese student associations, to better serve them, to better serve incoming freshman classes,” he said.

“Because obviously not only the student comes, and she or he spends money while they’re at our colleges, but many times their family members, their parents come, or maybe their parents and their grandparents — that’s all potential new opportunities for business,” he said.

Boston also has a regular stream of direct flights to Beijing and Shanghai: It currently has daily flights to Beijing and Hong Kong, and a four-times-a-week flight to Shanghai.

Moscaritolo said if the city were able to expand the Shanghai service to daily flights, it could be a “very successful service”, but the current US-China bilateral treaty on aviation and transportation caps the number of direct flights between Tier 1 Chinese cities and American cities.

“I understand why the treaty has the limits — because there’s a priority to open nonstop service between secondary cities to the US,” he said.

If the treaty is amended, Moscaritolo said the 500,000 figure could be reached before 2021.