Roadshow in China: Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing

From March 30 to April 5, the Associació del Passeig de Gràcia attended the Roadshow organized by Tur España in China. During this promotional action, three of the country’s major cities were visited: Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing. In each of these, we attended direct conferences in which we had the opportunity to present the global offer of the Passeig de Gràcia to different travel agencies, tour operators and airlines.

In both Guangzhou and Shanghai we attended two training sessions by Nélida Jiménez Molina Tourism Counselor of the Spanish Tourism Office in Guangzhou, and Darío Polo, director of the Spanish Office of Tourism in Beijing. It was an introduction to the new trends in the Chinese tourism market.

Currently, China is the second world economy, behind the United States. This growth is due to several factors; the commitment made by the service markets and the development of the domestic market, the strong growth, in the last three years of the urbanization of the country, and finally, and as a consequence of the two previous factors, the increase of the middle class

Regarding tourism, there is no doubt that China is an emerging market in tourism, there has been a great growth in terms of travel turnover since 2008 and is expected to continue rising much more in 2019 and 2020.

At present, China is in the third phase of progressive tourist opening of the country: This phase is marked by the development of an internal economy and tourism as “soft power”. This new way of traveling of the Chinese market is the cause of the greater purchasing power of the population, better education (they speak more foreign languages), access to Internet and social networks that discover the citizens all the diversity and attractions of the outside world, motivating them to travel.

Spain is not in the TOP 10 countries that want to visit the Chinese population, but has risen 26% this last year.

The Chinese decide their destination place according to the following factors: Beauty of the place and tourist attractions, the security of the country, and the facility to obtain the visa.

The most requested products when traveling to Europe are: art and culture, shopping, gastronomy and urban tourism.

Spain has managed to consolidate itself as one of the favorite destinations for Chinese tourists. In 2010, 102,000 tourists traveled to Spain, and in 2018, has raised, 650,000 tourists from the Asian country have visited Spain. The increase in these last 8 years has been progressive, but positive for our country.

The main motivation of Chinese tourists who visited Spain is leisure (86% of the total). Business trips also showed a high relative weight (10%). The majority stayed in hotels (85%) and their favorite destination so far is Catalonia (49%), followed at a great distance by the Community of Madrid (34%) and Andalusia (10%).

A new segment of Chinese tourists is being observed: millennials, young people of upper-middle class that are radically transforming Chinese outbound tourism, and whose weight will continue to grow in the next years.

In terms of age, 26% of trips are between 10-29 years old, 55% are between 30-49 years old and 19% are over 50 years old. In terms of sexes, 52% of tourists are women, while 48% are men.

Chinese spend an average of 6 hours a day using their mobile device. Therefore, to capture their attention, it is essential to focus on digital marketing and social media, and provide more facilities in this regard: enable payment with mobile; introduce the Chinese language in companies to facilitate communication; corporate accounts in Wechat, it is a fundamental communication tool for them.