Society

Destination: land of maple leaves

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-19 08:40

BEIJING - China and Canada inaugurated a new era of tourism trade under the Approved Destination Status (ADS) program as the Canada-bound inaugural tour groups departed from China on Wednesday.

The Canada-bound inaugural tour group under the Approved Destination Status program between China and Canada wave goodbye to their family members on Wednesday at the Beijing Capital International Airport. [China Daily]

It was the first time in history that Chinese visitors could land on the country of maple leaves with tourist visas.

Yu Debin, deputy chief of the Beijing municipal tourism bureau, said 268 Chinese tourists left from Beijing on Wednesday.

The number of visitors in the inaugural tour groups reached 381, including those departing from Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Canadians hope Chinese tourists to their country will double from about 200,000 this year to 400,000 in 2015 because of the ADS program.

The Canadian Tourism Commission has been seeking an ADS designation from the Chinese government for the past 10 years. In 2005, Canada and China came close to reaching an agreement. The final approval came from Beijing last December when Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited China.

With ADS, Chinese citizens can more easily obtain tourist visas to travel to Canada in a leisure group tour format.

The ADS also provide the Canadian travel industry with the opportunity to market to China - the world's fastest growing outbound travel market.

"The big opportunity is that we can now compete on a level playing field with other tourism destinations. They are all going after the same growing Chinese market, so we'll be up against them for leisure and business travelers," said Michele McKenzie, president of the Canadian Tourism Commission.

"I have traveled to more than 30 counties," said Arthur Yan, a 44-year-old man who works in a medical equipment company based in Beijing.

Yan, with his wife, is among those 381 visitors in the inaugural Canada-bound tour groups.

"I love traveling abroad because it refreshes me when I encounter different people, languages and cultures," he said.

China is Canada's second-largest trading partner, after the United States. Chinese tourism to Canada, about 200,000 visitors a year before the ADS agreement, has been rising about 5 percent each year recently. Most of the travelers were students, business people and Chinese citizens with family members living in Canada.

Statistics issued by the office of Prime Minister Stephen Harper show Chinese tourists spend about CA$1,650 ($1,597) per visit, and they have the longest average stay in Canada, 28 nights per visit.

China's increasingly affluent middle class is Asia's largest outbound tourist market, and likely the largest untapped tourist business for other counties.

According to the National Tourism Administration, outbound Chinese tourists will reach 52 million in 2010.

To better attract China's rising wealth, Japan eased visa restrictions on tourists from China in July, making the big-spending Chinese tourists a remedy for its prolonged economic downturn.

According to a recent report by C-trip, an online travel service in China, the number of Chinese individual tourists in July alone is the sum of the previous six months after Japan loosened its visa restrictions for individual tourists.

Another neighboring country, the Republic of Korea, also relaxed visa requirements for Chinese tourists to share a piece of China's booming outbound tourism.

China Daily - Xinhua