Foreign tour groups to be allowed to organize outbound travel
May 31, 2010 Category Travel, Weekly
China will allow foreign tour operators to organize Chinese tour groups to travel abroad in the near future, as a new set of regulations is being drafted. Currently foreign tour operators are allowed to operate inbound and domestic travel, but are barred from outbound business, the most lucrative part of the Chinese tourism market. Travel companies from 14 countries and regions have established 44 foreign tour agencies and joint ventures in China. The companies stayed in business in China even though they earned little or even suffered losses. Petra Hedorfer, Chief Executive of the German National Tourist Board, said that the liberalization move was “a big step”. Chinese tourists are likely to spend USD100 billion on overseas trips in 2015, Shao Qiwei, Director of the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA), forecast. The projection is based on every Chinese tourist currently spending USD1,000 on each outbound trip and the estimation that Chinese tourists will make 100 million overseas trips by 2015. China’s tourism deficit is expected to increase to USD6 billion this year, up from the first deficit in tourism last year of around USD4 billion, when Chinese tourists spent USD42 billion on overseas travel – including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, while foreign tourists spent only USD38 billion on the mainland. In the first quarter of this year, Chinese tourists in Germany outnumbered the Japanese for the first time.
- Chinese officials expect more than one million mainland tourists to visit Taiwan this year, up from 606,000 last year. For now, only tour groups are allowed, but the Chinese government is considering to allow individual trips.
- Hotel group Accor plans to at least triple its Pullman portfolio in China over the next three years. Seven hotels under the Pullman brand are operating in China, while another 14 hotels are in the pipeline. The newest hotels added to Pullman’s China network include the 482-room Pullman Zhangjiajie in Hunan province and the 280-room Pullman Dongguan Dalang in Guangdong Province, due to open in 2012. At present, Accor runs 94 hotels in 42 Chinese cities.
- Marco Polo Hotels, the hotel management arm of property-to-media conglomerate Wharf (Holdings), has five hotels in China, two of which are located in Fujian. In the next two years it plans to increase its portfolio to eight with new hotels to be opened in Chengdu, Sichuan; and Wuxi and Changzhou in the Yangtze River Delta.
- Mission Hills Group, owner of the world’s largest golf club in Shenzhen, will boost investment sixfold in a golfing complex in Hainan on which it will spend a further CNY25 billion by adding more golfing, retail and community facilities. Mission Hills is switching its focus from foreigners to Chinese golfers. The group opened a 12-course club, the world’s largest, in 1992 in Shenzhen.
- China Southern Airlines will double its fleet in Xinjiang to 80 aircraft in five years as the provincial government offers tax breaks and subsidies and the airline forecasts passenger growth in Xinjiang will triple to 12 million by 2015. International flights from Urumqi to Istanbul and Dubai will be opened while the number of flights to Tehran will be increased.
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