Society

Lucrative overseas travel gets boost

By Xin Dingding (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-05-27 07:41

More expected to go abroad

BEIJING - Chinese tourists are likely to spend $100 billion on overseas trips in 2015, Shao Qiwei, head of the China National Tourism Administration, forecast on Wednesday.

The projection is based on every Chinese tourist currently spending $1,000 on each outbound trip and the estimation that Chinese tourists will make 100 million overseas trips by 2015.

In the meantime, the deficit in tourism is expected to increase to $6 billion this year, up from China's first deficit in tourism last year of around $4 billion, he said.

In 2009, a total of 47.66 million overseas trips contributed $42 billion to overseas economies, including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, while overseas tourists spent only $38 billion on the mainland.

"China is now the No 2 market for Germany, but in terms of future potential China is definitely the No 1 market," said Petra Hedorfer, CEO of the German National Tourist Board.

In the first quarter of this year, Chinese tourists outnumbered the Japanese for the first time, she said.

The rapidly increasing number of visitors from China have pushed the overseas tourism industry to double promotion efforts, as well as to provide services that specially cater to the needs of Chinese tourists.

J.W. Marriott Jr, Chairman and CEO of Marriott International, said that many of its hotels outside of China now provide Chinese-style breakfasts and are hiring more Mandarin-speaking staff to communicate with Chinese tourists.

To encourage even more visitors from China, Germany now issues visas to individual Chinese tourists, with a low refusal rate, Petra Hedorfer said.