New | Tailor-made tours: More Chinese ditching the package tour playbook for deeper cultural immersion
Holidaymakers happy to pay more for unique experiences catered to their personal tastes – and skip the hassle of planning
Art tours for the family in Singapore, vintage-car excursions in Monaco for guys, and visits to Japan’s cartoon museums for the kids. Tailor-made travel services are burgeoning in China as more holidaymakers seek unconventional experiences without the time-consuming preparations that usually come with them.
Judy Feng, a secondary school teacher in Shenzhen, used to spend months researching her holiday destinations and planning her itineraries, booking hotels, checking train and bus schedules and looking up the best local cafés to hang out at.
READ MORE: Everything you need to know about China's tourists
It didn’t take long for Feng, 42, to find it all too stressful dealing with the information overload, especially from the internet.
“To ensure a smooth trip, I would review photos of tourist attractions so many times that by the time I actually got there, I felt like I had lost all interest in them,” she said.
So in March, when Feng, her retired parents and her sister’s family decided on a 15-day summer vacation in Scandinavia, she decided to engage a Chinese-run tour company based in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. The result was a customised tour that cost less than 30,000 yuan (HK$36,000) per person, including accommodations and local transport, she said.
Feng is among a small but fast-growing number of experienced Chinese vacationers – mostly middle-class or wealthy from the first-tier cities – who are willingly to pay more for tailor-made tours. All the clients are required to do in preparation for their holiday is to select their preferred style and type of accommodation, transport and restaurants, and decide how and when to travel.
China has seen an unprecedented boom in outbound tourism – more than 107 million Chinese travelled overseas last year, and 140 million are expected to do so this year, according to the China Tourism Academy. More than 65 per cent of the number were independent travellers , meaning they planned and booked their own itineraries rather than joining tour groups.
CTA director Dai Bing said that as middle-class holidaymakers grew more accustomed to overseas travel, they were becoming more interested in gaining a deeper experience abroad instead of simply traipsing around tourist attractions. Customised tour services allowed them to better experience the local culture, he said.
Alan Tao, executive director of Newayer, a Beijing-based tailor-made travel service, said such tours generally cost about 20 to 30 per cent more than free-and-easy travel, but that the Chinese middle class were generally willing to pay more for them.
Newayer, which was set up last year and has 30 employees in Shanghai and Beijing, saw more than 1,000 Chinese use their services last year, Tao said. Encouraged by good business, the company has expanded its offerings from polar cruises to self-drive European holidays and African safari tours.
Tourism is seen as one of the key drivers to boost China’s flagging economy. The State Council, the country’s cabinet, last month encouraged employers to give their staff half a day of paid leave every Friday in the summer. The aim was to encourage the workers to take short trips with a slightly longer weekend.
“Westerners start travelling with their parents from an early age, so when they grow up, they have already obtained rich experience to travel alone,” said Dennis Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Shijiebang, which sells customised travel plans in 30 countries through its website and mobile application.
“But the Chinese have started to travel overseas only in recent years, and they may need all kinds of assistance, from transport to accommodation and language. Shijiebang wants to be like an invisible tour guide who can help you throughout your trip.”
