Destination Vancouver: mainland Chinese tourist numbers go off the boil

They are still coming in droves, but those droves are no longer growing as quickly as Canadian tourism officials would like.

There was a time when the Vancouver economy wasn't so dependent on tourists from China. Approved Destination Status (ADS), which allows guided groups of mainland travellers to visit a country, wasn't bestowed upon Canada until 2010.

Before then, the limited number of mainland visitors to the country weren't the type who went sightseeing and shopping; they were mostly businessmen, students and those on government business. But just four years after the ADS was granted, visitors from the mainland outstripped those from Britain for the first time, becoming the biggest overseas market for the city and fundamentally changing how Vancouver marketed itself.

Driven by a weak Canadian dollar and an increasing number of international flight arrivals, Vancouver has had a banner few years in tourism. However, Destination BC, the provincial government's tourism promotion arm, says the number of mainland visitors rose by just 1.8 per cent in November, compared with the same month in 2014. No one is dismissing that gain but it's clear that the surge in visitor numbers is stalling.

"There was a lot of pent-up demand," says Monica Leeck, Destination BC's market development point person for Asia. "For the past five years, we've enjoyed double-digit growth and you can only sustain that for so long."

The slowdown in the growth of mainland visitors is partly due to air access. For years, more flights were bound for Vancouver from China than almost anywhere else, but competition is now ramping up in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. Los Angeles, for example, now has 20 more flights from China than Vancouver, according to Leeck.