USA bound

One of the biggest tour agencies in the United States opened its first China regional office in Beijing last week, amid the global economic slowdown and a sluggish travel market.

The financial tsunami is sure to hit the travel industry soon, Noel Irwin Hentschel, chairman and CEO of Los Angeles-based AmericanTours International (ATI), says.

"But we are proactive and aggressive to get deals done to bring up new destinations. It is even more important now in the crisis," she says.

"We will announce new packages, probably next month, ones which make people feel they cannot afford not to travel", she says.

ATI aims to bring an additional 100,000 Chinese tourists to the US and it handles 270,000 of them annually now, she says.

She says that there are only five US destinations - New York City, Washington DC, Hawaii, Los Angeles and San Francisco - that Chinese travel industry people are widely familiar with, and adds she believes more education about additional American vacation spots is one solution to bring more Chinese tourist to the US.

Hentschel says the company's new center in Beijing will train its Chinese tour agency employees about all 50 US states, a tactic that has proven useful, as it has helped ATI bring 30 million tourists from 70 countries to the US since 1977, she says.

But an industry insider, who insisted on anonymity, says that large American tour operators like ATI still needed to conquer the differences in business cultures in order to expand in China.

"It must be understood that in China, tour agencies' profits are very marginal, and there is no way the domestic outbound operator could pay its foreign partner a down payment before it sends a tourist group over," he says.

The difference has caused situations where most domestic outbound tour operators are cooperating with foreign tour agencies run by overseas Chinese, which are relatively small in scale, he says.

It is not only the case in the US but also in almost all other foreign destinations, he says.

Chinese travelers began to travel in tour groups to the US in June this year. In the first three months, 1,400 Chinese were granted tourist visas, earlier reports said.

At present only nine provinces and municipalities can organize tour groups to America, but it is expected more provinces will join before the end of this year.

(China Daily 11/24/2008 page7)