A survey of American travelers by AAA and GlobalInsight has some interesting findings.

China and India may see larger jumps in American visitors this summer than any other country. China may see a 13% increase, to 573,000 American visitors.

Travel to Canada and Mexico will be about the same this summer as last.
Travel to Italy should be up nearly 5%, to 1.6 million American travelers.
Travel to France should jump by nearly 7% to about 1.1 million American travelers.
Travel to Germany ought to increase by slightly more than 4%, to 724,000 American travelers.

Which goes to show that although much is made of the China travel boom the facts are it is still a long, long way behind many, more traditional tourist countries.
Source: Budget

It seems likely that with the easing of tensions between the mainland and Taiwan then we can look forward to something of a tourist boom. Hoteliers and guides and restaurants plainly think this is a good thing.

However, the prospect of a mainland tourist invasion has not been view throughout with unalloyed delight.

Skeptics say only a few privileged businesses would benefit, and that the island’s scenic spots could be spoiled by greedy developers and a tourist stampede.

Long off-limits to the mainland Taiwan is now popular among mainland tourists for its scenery, preservation of Chinese tradition and for historical sites.

Chinese tourists were first officially admitted to Taiwan in 2002. But visits are capped at 1,000 a day, and tourists must travel to the island via third locations because of restrictions on direct cross-strait flights.

If Ma Ying-jeou, the president-elect, (seen looking dashing in our illustration) has his way, that will change.

Ma, who takes office on May 20, has promised to reach an agreement on more Chinese tourists and weekend cross-strait charter flights by early July, expanding to weekday charters by the end of the year and regularly scheduled flights by summer 2009. All this is part of his election pledge to stimulate the island’s laggard economy with closer cross-strait economic ties.

Under the plan, the cap would be tripled to 3,000 Chinese tourists a day, or more than 1 million per year. Last year, 320,169 mainlanders visited Taiwan, only 81,900 of whom officially came as tourists. The rest were listed as business travelers or ‘others.’

In a few years, Ma hopes, the cap could rise to 10,000 tourist visits per day.

Tourist revenues will have benefits throughout the economy, he says, especially helping lower- and middle-income Taiwanese in the service sector.

The investment bank CLSA estimates that if 1 million Chinese tourists visit Taiwan each year they will spend $1.3 billion, and help boost GDP by up to 1.4% of 2007 levels.

Not everyone has such a rosy view. Some point out that the economic benefits will not be spread around, because Chinese tend to travel to Taiwan in regimented tour groups that only stop at contracted businesses.
Source: NewsWire

More Chinese tourists are expected to travel to overseas destinations such as Hong Kong with the appreciation of the RMB against the US dollar. For Chinese travelers, it means stronger purchasing power in the United States and other countries and regions that use US dollars or peg their currencies to it.

Since Chinese tour groups are still unable to organize trips to the US, it is destinations such as Hong Kong, with its currency pegged to the US dollar, that attract tourists from the Chinese mainland.

Guo Guang, manager with ctrip.com, an online travel service, said, ‘More people have called to inquire about our Hong Kong tour packages than usual.’

So far, the number of customers who purchased Hong Kong tour products from ctrip.com has increased by 70% year-on-year.

But outbound travel is not being seriously driven by the rise and rise of the renminbi. Dun Jidong, marketing director of the China Travel Service’s overseas tourism department, said, ‘The current yuan appreciation can only serve as an auxiliary factor to the booming outbound tourism market. If it is to prompt much more people to travel overseas, the appreciation has to be so significant that it leads to a huge drop in the price of outbound tour products.’
Source: China Daily

If you work for a big American company and you have to travel you have very few choices. The company makes them for you. It has a deal with yet another company which negotiates lower travel and accommodation costs because of the bulk involved. The individual traveler simply does not have much say. Because the company saves serious amount of money.

At the moment China business has, generally, not got on to this area of cost saving.

Jean-Pierre Remy, president of Expedia Corporate Travel said fewer than one in five companies in China currently uses a travel management company, leaving room for explosive growth.

It is, in fact, a no-brainer.

According to American Express China’s business travel market is worth $10 billion, the world’s fourth-biggest. Online travel agency Expedia Inc’s corporate travel unit expects growth in China’s corporate travel services market to speed up substantially from its current pace of 20 to 30%.

Expedia Corporate Travel, a five-year-old business, is still small time compared to its massive retail parent. It had 1.3 billion bookings globally in 2007, compared with 20 billion bookings for Expedia Inc.

It is moving into China in a joint venture with eLong Inc. the country’s second-largest online travel firm in which Expedia owns a stake. Yes, there is competition already for this immense market but it is barely tapped and Expedia has a major growth opportunity.
Source: Reuters

The idea is that you travel by bus to China and it takes two weeks. The system has the somewhat unfortunate (and possibly religiously offensive) name of BuddhaBus. The idea is that it will save on carbon emissions.

The figures offered to support this are open to argument.

It is claimed that flying causes roughly the same amount of climate change per mile as travelling by car. While you might travel 10,000 miles in one year in a car, you can cover as much ground in a plane in one day. The carbon dioxide produced by one person on a return flight to China equates to over three years of sustainable emissions. A coach carrying 40 passengers cuts the impact by almost 90%.

If BuddhaBus is a success, it will show that people are prepared to go to great lengths — 8,000km of pretty rough travel — to reduce the theoretical impact on the environment.

BuddhaBus will take just 16 days to travel the 8,000km from Victoria Station in London to Urumqi in Xinjiang province, China (shown in our illustration) allowing only one night’s stopover in most places.

It is claimed ‘the perfect antidote to the stresses of the modern world’. Indeed the bus’s name suggests this will be a sort of zen-like escape from the horrors of modern travel.

Anyone who has traveled seriously long distances by bus will know this is total nonsense. In Australia where long distance bus travel is an affordable reality for many students passengers are frequently physically distressed before the reach their destination and abandon the effort.

BuddhaBus promises ‘Regular breaks and stopovers’ ensuring passengers ‘are able to appreciate the highlights of the trip at their leisure’ in places such as such as Warsaw, Moscow and Almaty.

As you are averaging 800km a day the amount of time you will be able to ‘relax and reflect;’ will be very limited.

Passengers will get to know the inside of their coach far better than the countries they travel through.

The first BuddhaBus departs London September 6, arriving in Urumqi 16 days later.

$1,600 single, $2,606 return, including camping and refreshments but not meals or hotels which makes it, compared to flying, a very expensive hobby. And a dashed uncomfortable one.
Source: Guardian

Ctrip.com, a (perhaps, ‘the’ would be a more appropriate word) Chinese online travel operator, has posted a net profit of RMB398 million ($55 million) in 2007, up 66% over the previous year.

In the fourth quarter, net profit of the Nasdaq-listed firm more than doubled to RMB135 million.

For the full year 2007, business revenue rose more than 50% to RMB1.3 billion, 53% of which came from hotel reservation service which contributed RMB677 million.

Business revenue through air ticket bookings reached RMB503 million, accounting for 39% of the total, up 72% from 2006.

Co-founder and CEO Min Fan became Chief Executive Officer in January 2006. Before becoming involved in Ctrip he had more than 15 years of experience in travel-related industries. From 1997 to 2000, he was the Chief Executive Officer of Shanghai Travel Service Company, a leading domestic travel agency in China.
He obtained his Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He also studied at the Lausanne Hotel Management School of Switzerland in 1995.
Min Fan is also the founding shareholder of Home Inns & Hotels Management, a Chinese economy hotel developer, operator, and franchisor with a $1.2 billion market capitalization.

Ctrip publishes its expectations that its net revenue will grow to 35% in 2008. This is almost certainly a conservative estimate. In the year of the Olympic Games and with the abolition of airline tickets and the massive increase in travel within China by Chinese, Ctrip is set for a major increase to its turnover and profitability.
Source: China View

First the news as generally reported: a China Tourism Association official suggested that Chinese tourists avoid shopping in the Paris-based Galeries Lafayette. (Not a bad idea in itself considering the prices.)

The official, who was, as is pretty invariably the case, unnamed, said the association was concerned about an incident where two Chinese tourists were treated insultingly while shopping in the famed French department store.

A newlywed couple from the eastern Zhejiang Province were accused of using a forged note while paying for a purchase at Lafayette. They were then taken to a police station where they were questioned and searched.
After a bank expert identified the note was real, the couple returned to the cashier who again refused the note and persisted with the claim that it was counterfeit.

The French department store then made a formal apology to the couple.

There are other views expressed in other media.

One, on the outer edges of reality, suggests it was political and happened because China is really furious over weapons that France wanted to sell Taiwan. The department store nonsense was China’s way of getting France’s attention.

True the timing was a bit odd. It was nearly two weeks after the incident — after the chief executive of Galeries Lafayette apologized to the couple — that the un-named official from the China Tourism Association said Chinese tourists should stop shopping at Galeries Lafayette, and instructed Chinese tour operators to stop taking them to the store.

It is a very long stretch to suggest that this incident is the result of recent talks between Taiwanese Defense Ministry officials and French arms dealers.

According to media reports in Taiwan it wants to buy Rafale fighter jets made by Dassault Systemes , eight mine-hunting vessels, air-to-surface missiles and other weapons from France. It does seem a most unlikely reaction.
Sources: China View and Forbes

The Sino-U.S. memorandum of understanding (MOU) on tourism means that Chinese will be able to travel to the United States in groups on tourist visas. Currently, the United States issues only business visas to Chinese. The travel business expects a surge of travel.

A manager with China International Travel Service (CITS), China’s biggest travel service, said, ‘Everything will be in place only when we know how the MOU will be implemented. Some U.S. travel agencies are coming to us as well.’

Most travel agencies interviewed plan to promote tours linking Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego and Hawaii, at an average cost of RMB25,000 yuan (US$3,351) per person.

Liu Yanwen, manager of U.S. section in China Travel Service (CTS), China’s second largest travel service, said, ‘Although very inviting, the U.S. tour will keep some potential travelers away because of the tight visa interview procedure and the comparatively high expense.’

The European Union does not require visa interviews for tourists in groups. A tour covering 12 European countries costs about RMB16,000 yuan (US$2,162).

And Liu Yanwen said the transport costs in Europe are also lower than those in the United States.

She said, ‘Many Chinese people are curious about America as they are already familiar with it through Hollywood movies. So I am quite optimistic about the U.S. travel market.’

Source: People’s Daily Online

Major companies such as Marriott International, the Intercontinental Group, Accor of France and Shangri-La of Hong Kong have built networks and are expanding aggressively through the country.

According to the World Travel & Tourism Council the China market — now the sixth largest — is expected to become the world’s second biggest in ten years.

Joe McInerney, president of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, said, ‘It’s irresistible. It is a tremendous market for hotels. And the opportunities are enormous.’

Bruce McKenzie, regional VP for Greater China at Intercontinental, the oldest Western hotel operator in China, said, ‘There’s no doubt that it is an absolutely key market and we have a comprehensive growth strategy.’

IHG, which has been in China for 23 years, currently has 67 properties there. It plans too open 125 more by the end of 2008. The company’s workforce will almost double to 43,000 over the next three years.
Accor already operates 50 hotels there under its Sofitel, Novotel and Ibis brands, has announced plans to open or start developing more than 180 hotels by 2010 most of which will be under the Ibis, one star, brand.
Shangri-La, Asia’s biggest listed hotel chain, plans to raise at least $662 million to add to its 19 hotels in China.
Marriott International, which opened its first hotel in China in 1989, plans to go from 25 to 48 properties between now and 2010 and to 100 within the next five to six years.
Wyndham Worldwide by the end of this year will have 20 Ramada Inns, 13 Howard Johnsons, 11 Days Inns, 50 Super 8s.
Best Western will double its stable of hotels to 28 by end of this year.

Source: CNBBC

It is not easy being the PR for the French company hotel Accor. They have enough brands ranging from Ibis at the lower end (think high quality inexpensive) to the outright luxury end which is the Sofitel and that is moving up a fraction — not an easy trick — while Accor is positioning Pullman as an upscale hotel somewhere between the first-class hotel Sofitel and Novotel. The group aims to re-define the concept of business accommodation to make Pullman a dedicated place for living and corporate conferences.

At lunch a Novotel executive asked us — two journalists who have been working since there were wolves in Wales — if we had ever heard of Pullman. Ha!

The term Pullman was used to refer to railroad sleeping cars which were run by the Pullman Company (founded by George Pullman) in the United States. As a result (the PR person did not know this which makes one lament for modern education) every Pullman attendant thereafter was named George in his memory.

Indeed, in the splendid scene in the movie The Sting, where the card game is being manipulated on a Pullman, the organizer was the porter, name George. The real name of the actor has Larry Mann. (All of this is known because the writer used to work with one of the co-producers.)

Pullman did not keep up the insistence on staff nomenclature when the trains came to Europe. They were run by the Pullman Company or were lounge cars operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits.

Specifically, in Great Britain, Pullman refers to the lounge cars operated by the British Pullman Car Company. Of which the most famous example was the Brighton Belle between London and Brighton. Sir Laurence Olivier traveled on it every day. When they dropped kippers from the breakfast menu he wrote in mighty protest. So British Rail closed the line. British Rail was like that in those days.

Gilles Pelisson, the chief executive officer of Accor, undoubtedly knows all this which is why he is the boss. He said, ‘The idea of Pullman is to fill a position in the five-star sector that is left by moving Sofitel higher in the market. We are raising the Sofitel brand’s standards to what is called upper-upscale in Europe, and Pullman will fit into the five-star sector under Sofitel and ahead of Novotel.’

The phrase upper-upscale is, I think, one we can live without. Probably reads better in the original French.

Next year, Gilles Pellison said the Pullman network would have 45 hotels operating in 23 countries in Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Latin America. By 2015, the company will have 250 Pullman hotels around the world.

In the Asia Pacific region, the Pullman brand will expand rapidly this year, with openings throughout Thailand and China. Further extensive development is planned throughout the region over the coming years, with an estimate of about 40 hotels in operation by 2010.

Note these are hotels not trains. A true Pullman train needs a smooth and well maintained track to work properly. In parts of Asia these are in short supply.

One idea to set the brand differently to the other competition is that Pullman will provide every client with a personal manager to take care of any problem around the clock. The company said, ‘Honesty and transparency are our testimony. The hotel wants to offer good value for money, so whatever a client pays, they will get double.’

Thus the concierge won’t be like George in The Sting. That George organized bent poker games.