Have money, will travel

Hainan is China's No 1 domestic tourist destination and also attracts more than twice the number of overseas visitors of any other province. But now, the country's biggest holidaymaking hotspot has even bigger plans to attract big spenders.

"Tourism has an intrinsically high-end tendency," Hainan Tourism Bureau director Zhang Qi says. And Zhang, it seems, has no plans to buck the trend.

He believes the sector should focus on luring to the province more of the type of vacationers who come with bulging billfolds to offload during their stays.

While Hainan has already claimed a sizeable slice of the domestic market's upper crust, the country's only tropical island is now looking across its encompassing seas for fresh flocks of moneyed travelers.

"We have to face the fact that for now, Hainan's fame is mostly within China, so we have to work to make it known throughout the world," Zhang says.

"And to be frank, to have a thousand mainland grandpas and grannies come here sightseeing every day, each fully equipped with instant noodles and boiled water in their bags, who never consume while on the island, is a waste of resources and definitely not what we're looking for.

"For example, everybody loves BMWs. But so what? In the end, it's what is in your wallet that counts," says Zhang, who stresses that the province's door is open to all.

Hainan was the destination of 18.46 million travelers in 2007, up 15 percent from the previous year. Of them, 5.67 million were foreigners, a 63 percent increase from 2006, according to the provincial tourism bureau's reports.

Today, the overwhelming majority of foreign visitors are Russian, because the province has worked to market itself as a tropical hotspot to China's chilly northern neighbor. Russian President Vladimir Putin also reportedly told his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao on one occasion that he "longed for Hainan". In Sanya city's Dadonghai Bay, Russian-language signs abound, and most menus in the area include borsch, kiev and herring.

More than 1.51 million Russians visited the province last year, compared to 32,625 South Koreans - the next largest international group.

The bureau's market analysis found tourists from North America usually come for golf and holidaymaking, while most Japanese come for golf. Visitors from Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore usually come for family visits and to see the Nanshan Buddha, which, at 108 m tall, has the very distinct designation of being the world's tallest Buddha statue standing in the sea.

In 2001, Hainan adopted a visa policy unique among the provinces to give vim to its internationalization push.

Under the new rules, passport-holding tourists from 21 countries don't need a visa to come to Hainan, provided they stay less than 15 days and come through a tour group organized by international travel services in the province. The deal extends to travelers from Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Italy, Russia, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Zhang believes Hainan offers a special appeal to these foreign visitors.

"The main problem with Chinese tourism is that most of it centers on sightseeing," Zhang says. "But while many neighboring provinces focus on sightseeing and historical relics, such as the Terracotta Warriors and the Great Wall, Hainan's tourism focuses on holidaymaking, especially as China's only tropical island."

And among the provinces, he adds, "(Hainan) already has the best tourism facilities in China".

"But our tourism industry so far isn't strong enough to support the goal of becoming a world-class tourism destination."

So, Zhang says, Hainan is not in competition with other provinces. Instead, "our rivals are tropical islands in different parts of the world", such as Hawaii and Bali. And despite facing a dog-eat-dog competition, Zhang believes Hainan would soon lead the pack.

"As we internationalize Hainan's tourism market, within five to 10 years, we would become Asia's No 1 tourism attraction," he says.

"We expect large numbers of tourists from East Asia, such as those from Japan and South Korea, so we must make sure our facilities are top class."

Zhang says Sanya's Yalong Bay has already been successfully transformed into a "world-class" tourism area.

Currently, the big push is to enhance services, such as dining, banking and entertainment. To hasten improvements in these areas, the government has designated 2008 as "the year of high-quality service" for the second consecutive year - a subset of an initiative announced by provincial Party secretary Wei Liucheng to comprehensively promote the province's tourism, which began in 2007 and will end in 2009.

Yan Zheng, mayor of the up-and-coming tourism town of Wenchang, says developing services would be crucial to accommodating the expected "flood" of tourists in the coming years. Currently, the city on the northeastern coast is developing its beaches, a forest reserve and an outer space theme park to open in 2010.

"The tourism industry is completely new to our city for now, so we take it as a golden opportunity for Wenchang to develop its economy," Yan says. "We estimate it'll take about five years to develop our tourism to a standard of high-end tourism."

Wanning city's deputy Party secretary Fu Lidong says the eastern coastal town is also clamoring to enrich services in anticipation of a large influx of visitors to the beachside and ecological attractions it's developing.

"More Chinese have cash in their pockets, and a holiday resort is where they want to go if they have free time," Fu says.

One of the biggest needs for the province's tourism sector, according to Zhang, is the establishment of a complaint center. The center should have a quick response time, and companies found violating tourism rules should have their licenses immediately revoked. To improve accountability, all companies in the sector should be required to sign contracts with the government binding them to obey relevant regulations, he adds.

While more efforts are needed in this area, progress has been made, Zhang says.

"Since we have taken control of our tourism resources, our chaotic tourism situation has improved," he adds.

But any snags up to now have been well worth the benefit to the province's people, he says.

"According to a two-pronged strategy developed in 1995, Hainan would focus on both tourism and industry for its development, with tourism as the mainstay industry that would boost other industries," he explains.

"For example, tourism has boosted agricultural industries, such as the growing of orchids, and sales of handicrafts," he says, adding the petroleum and telecommunications industries have also grown.

Zhang also says such development has been a boon rather than a bane for Hainan's environment. The province's holidaymaking offerings fall under the categories of "green", or ecological, and "blue", or beachside, tourism, meaning Hainan's environmental vitality colors its tropical appeal to visitors.

A World Health Organization study reportedly found Sanya had the second-best air quality among the world's cities, while Haikou ranked fifth.

Sanya deputy mayor Li Baiqing says 75 percent of the city's tax revenues come from tourism. "Its impact on improving local living conditions is huge," he says.

Haikou's mayor Xu Tangxian explains that because the city government recognizes the environment is critical to the capital's tourism, it has spent hundreds of thousands of yuan dismantling and relocating polluting enterprises.

"It's different from those years during which we would act with concern for development but without concern for the environment," he says. "In the past, we invited foreign investment indiscriminately, but now, we opt for only the best investors."

He adds that the city has also established two protected areas - Shishan Volcanic Cluster National Geopark and Dongzhaigang Mangrove Forest Nature Reserve - where no industrial plants are allowed to operate.

(China Daily 04/10/2008 page20)