Chinese Tourists Are Taking Over the Earth, One Selfie at a Time
Asia is the epicenter of a boom that is changing how we travel.
By
Adam Majendie
One of the strongest drivers of global economic growth
isn’t factories or financial services or internet startups, it’s what we
do when we’re not working. We are becoming a planet of tourists.
Consider
this: For the past seven years, the travel-and-tourism sector has
outperformed the overall economy every year, contributing as much as
$7.6 trillion in 2016, including the wider impact on the economy,
according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. During the next
decade, the council predicts, almost one in four jobs created worldwide
will be related to tourism.
Nowhere is this revolution more dramatic than in Asia.
A rising tide of travelers from China is spreading out across the
region, out-shopping, outspending and out-eating every other nation.
They are filling hotels, tour buses and cruise ships. They are
overwhelming airports and train stations, and they are sending home
petabytes of pictures that encourage their compatriots to join the
global invasion. Their ranks are being swollen by millions of others
from around Asia, a generation who would rather raise their status with a
foreign adventure than with a luxury bag.
“People’s
personal brands are being defined by the places they visit,” said Simon
Russell, chief executive officer of London-based luxury travel group
Scott Dunn, which last month bought rival Country Holidays Travel from
Singapore to expand its Asian clientele.
China already accounts
for more than a fifth of the money spent by outbound tourists, twice as
much as the next-biggest spender, the U.S., according to the United
Nations World Tourism Organization. And the Chinese have barely started —
only around 5 percent of them even have passports, and the government
is issuing about 10 million new travel documents every year.
Tourists arrive by boat at Mu Ko Ang Thong marine national park in Surat Thani province.
Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg
As
with Japan in the 1980s, citizens of nations that get rich, go places.
The emerging nations of Asia-Pacific will add more than 50 million new
outbound travelers in the five years ending in 2021, according to
Mastercard Inc.
Overwhelmingly, they come from a
smartphone-addicted generation that is rewriting the rules. The
ubiquitous flag-following Chinese tour groups are giving way to what the
industry calls FITs — free, independent travelers — who are using the
internet to plan itineraries, book flights, translate signs and
chronicle their exploits.
“A lot of customers are wanting to do
things their way,” said Chang Theng Hwee, a Singaporean who quit banking
25 years ago to build a travel business that offers bespoke holidays
for wealthy Asians in destinations like Antarctica and the Himalayas.
“They’re not interested in joining a group.”
The shift is
transforming the region, unleashing more than $100 billion in
infrastructure spending for bigger airports and jet fleets, new
railways, hotels and theme parks. The effects of this boom include
soaring property prices, stress on the environment and an avalanche of
apps and innovations that reimagine the way we experience the world.
By 2021, Chinese tourists will spend $429 billion abroad, according to a report by CLSA.
And they are spreading out. Weekend jaunts to the shops in Hong Kong or
the casinos in Macau are being usurped by new favorite destinations.
During the next three years, Japan, Thailand, the U.S. and Australia top
the must-visit list, according to the report, with other destinations
in Southeast Asia — especially Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and the
Philippines — following close behind.
For developing nations,
that’s putting a strain on infrastructure, underpinning the biggest
airport-building program in the region’s history. Thailand doesn’t have a
single international airport that isn’t way over its designed capacity,
and long lines at immigration are common. At least 178 new airports are
planned in Asia-Pacific, according to Visa Inc., and hundreds of
existing facilities are being expanded or upgraded.
Bawah Island in Indonesia.
Source: Bawah
The
result is a second revolution in tourism in the region — one that is
being fueled by social media: the opening up of more islands, cities and
remote locales to divert vacationers from the overcrowded and
increasingly jaded tourist hotspots of the 1990s and 2000s.
Indonesia has a plan to create “10 Balis,”
targeting places like the former World War II battleground of Morotai
Island for new holiday destinations. Thailand, which heavily promotes
tourism under the banner “Amazing Thailand,” has teamed up with Japan to
build a high-speed railway that would open up places along the route to
the north of the country. Neighbor Malaysia is countering with its own
cross-country rail project to the coasts of Kelantan and Terengganu,
states promoted this year in the capital’s international airport under a
“Joyful Malaysia” campaign.
At the heart of the changes transforming the industry is the nexus of internet, smartphone and big data.
“Travel was one of the first industries to actually be digitized,
going all the way to the 1950s,” said Douglas Quinby, an Atlanta-based
travel analyst at research firm Phocuswright Inc. “It’s only in the last
five to seven years that there have been the tools to process such
incredible amounts of data.”
Employees monitor the online traffic of Ctrip.com.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
Quinby
says China is leading the world in many mobile innovations and
applications. At the head of the pack is Ctrip.com International Ltd.,
based in Shanghai. Ctrip is China’s dominant online travel-booking
platform and second in the world by market value to U.S. service
Priceline Group Inc., which is also a major investor. The database of
information it has compiled on Chinese travelers is long and detailed.
“We
have all of the user data,” said Jenna Qian, head of destination
marketing at CTrip. The company monitors bookings, searches, user
demographics and consumer life cycle data — every action by millions of
Chinese tourists from the moment they begin to read about a location, to
their habits and preferences while traveling. “From dream to research
to booking to sharing, it all happens within our platform. Big data is
the foundation of tourism.”
The information makes Ctrip a valuable
partner for both internet companies in China like Tencent Holdings Ltd.
and airlines and overseas agencies trying to get a share of the tourism
yuan. The data helps predict hotel occupancy levels, ticket sales at
attractions, traffic levels and scores of other travel-related trends.
Robots, Selfies and Medicine Are Changing the Way We Travel
The
link is the smartphone, the tourist’s connection with the web, a fact
that has drawn dozens of startups to join the fray in Asia. They
offer recommendations, information, tickets, discounts, guides, currency
converters and a thousand other applications that give travelers a
bigger choice, from Hong Kong-based Klook’s experiential packages like
an all-you-can-drink sake tasting in Tokyo, to Baidu Inc.’s augmented
reality aided sign translator.
With visitors wielding tablets and
smartphones, hotels and airlines are realizing they don’t need to fill
planes and rooms with technology and content - they just need to give
the customer control. The phone becomes the room key, the menu, the
bill.
“There’s
absolutely no point in providing what people already have,” said Hubert
Viriot, chief executive officer of Yotel Ltd., which opened its first
Asian hotel in Singapore in November. “Everybody has a smartphone.” The
London-based chain runs city-center properties with hundreds of small,
high-tech, budget rooms that include features such as mood lighting and
app-based electronic keys.
Viriot sums up the attitude of the new
generation of traveler: “I don’t need 10 guys on the ground floor with
the gold keys to tell me how to travel. I’ve got a smartphone. I’ve got
apps, social media. I know how to travel.”
Visitors do yoga at the Farm San Benito in Batangas, the Philippines.
Source: The Farm San Benito
The
ubiquity of the technology means it is now embedded into every strata
of the market, from Yotel’s high-density hubs to luxury island
eco-lodges that you need a seaplane to reach.
Asia has long been
on the map for well-heeled travelers. Hotelier Adrian Zecha started the
first Aman Resort in 1988 in Phuket, Thailand, for an elite club of
jetsetters. Four Seasons Holdings Inc. officially opened its first
ultra-small boutique resort in Chiang Rai in Thailand in 2006.
Zecha,
who left Aman Resorts Group Ltd. in 2015, is looking to exploit a new
niche he calls “affordable” luxury through his Azerai brand, which
opened its first property in Luang Prabang, Laos, last year.
“I
noticed a new generation of younger people that is growing in numbers
for whom taking holidays signifies an aspect of their lifestyle,” Zecha
said. “They might not be as wealthy as my Aman junkies, so my challenge
is affordability.”
From spa clinics like The Farm at San Benito in
the Philippines to exclusive eco-resorts like Bawah Island in
Indonesia, Asia offers hundreds of possibilities for super-luxury
globetrotters. And developers are eyeing hundreds more. There are more
than 13,000 uninhabited tropical islands in Indonesia and the
Philippines alone, almost twice as many as all the islands in the
Caribbean. Some, like Siroktabe, can be rented as a private
desert island for a true Robinson Crusoe experience.
An entertainer puts on a fire show on Hua Thanon beach at night in Koh Samui, Thailand.
Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg
But
the biggest money is to be made in drawing hordes of tourists together
to one location, whether it be a casino resort in Singapore, an ancient
temple in Cambodia, a giant theme park in China or the latest
super-cruise ships like Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.’s Ovation of the Seas, which can cater to more than 4,000 passengers as it sails the seas around China each summer.
That’s
when the real power of all the collected data comes into its own. For
Ctrip’s Qian, the possibilities are vast. By knowing where a traveler
is, how they like to eat, what they like to buy, which hotels they
prefer and so on, travel platforms can begin to move beyond providing a
passive service and start actively influencing your holiday.
A
passenger whose flight has been delayed and who hasn’t bought a meal
since they left home three hours ago might get a phone notification
offering a 10 percent discount at the restaurant they’re about to walk
past after going through immigration. An airline could raise fares on a
particular route after learning that pictures of that destination are
suddenly trending on social media.
“Right now, users search for
information,” Qian said. “Going forward, we want the right information,
the relevant information, to be pushed to them, so they don’t even need
to look for it. That’s the essential goal.”
No comments:
Post a Comment