OpinionRiding the new wave of solo Chinese travellers
Younger, well-heeled tourists from the mainland are abandoning the group tour and increasingly striking out on their own overseas holidays
A new breed of younger, internet-savvy Chinese tourists is emerging, and their spending power is being targeted around the globe, industry players say.
According to Jason Yap, the Asia-Pacific chief executive of Travelzoo, a Nasdaq-listed company that gives information on tourism deals to subscribers, the shift in the industry will be away from mass travel to individual trips.
"Higher-income, higher-educated Chinese tourists tend to go for individual vacations. The people who take group tours are the lower-income tourists," Yap said.
In a Travelzoo survey of 470 Chinese respondents, 41 per cent said they would travel solo for leisure. Eleven per cent said they usually opted for group tours.
"This means China's outbound tourist spending will not only continue to grow but will be much more dynamic in sectors that cater to individual pursuits. This spending pattern will generate new travel trends that the industry will have to quickly adapt to," Yap said.
This means China's outbound tourist spending will not only continue to grow but will be much more dynamic in sectors that cater to individual pursuits
Wolfgang Georg Arlt, director of the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute in Germany, said a rapidly increasing section of the Chinese outbound tourist market was willing to spend more for high-quality services.