6 trends to attract the Chinese travel market

If China reopens in 2018, As of January 8, several studies have been published on what to expect from this all-important travel market and how the world should prepare for it.

Organized by Webin Travel in partnership with Travel Daily China, the nearly 200 attendees at the China Arising event couldn’t be better than hearing directly from people in the market or at the forefront of the most important travel event of the year. And Accor did last week.

“The whole world has been waiting for it,” said Charlie Lee, founder of Travel Daily China.

Here are the key takeaways on what changes have occurred in the travel technology landscape and what you can do to market to the Chinese traveler.

Air capacity remains the main limitation

All data points to rapid increases in searches and bookings. Data from Atlas, an aggregator of low-cost and domestic airline content, shows searches on major online travel agencies such as Ctrip, Trip.com, Qunar and Fliggy will shoot up once the ban is lifted. Two weeks after the re-opening, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore and Macau were the top five destinations for international flight searches, with Tokyo replacing Macau in fifth place in the eighth week.

Trip.com Group General Manager and Vice President of Global Markets Boon Sian Chai said the OTA saw a 250% booking growth immediately after January 8, and between January 1 and March 15, bookings grew 1000% over the same period. In 2022

Singapore and Thailand were the first two locations, where air power played a major role in the attack. “There’s definitely a lot of demand for registrations, and it has to do with where the air capacity is,” Chai said.

While the initial recovery was led by Chinese carriers, airlines such as Singapore Airlines and Scott were quick to restore capacity, boosting Singapore’s chances of catching the first wave of demand.

According to aviation analyst, Sobi Aviation’s Brendan Sobi, according to official airline guide schedule data, Singapore-China seat capacity in March 2023 is 37 percent, while overall Singapore capacity is at 78 percent. Singapore Airlines Group was at 34% and Chinese carriers at 44% in March.

The good news is, SIA Group is targeting to restore 80% to 90% of China capacity by the end of August.

Consumers want emotional value and convenience

Calvin Chu, global leisure business manager at Fligi, said it was seeing strong growth across all categories – flights, hotels and visa services. “There is a strong trend in consumer demand. About 200,000 travel products were sold in a campaign to promote foreign travel – flight packages, advance sales of hotels and resorts, theme parks, cruise island vacations.

Unique experiences and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities such as “The Grandeur of East Africa’s Wildlife Migration” and “Exchanging Wedding Vows in Semporna, Saba” are featured.

“Semporna means ‘perfect,’ so I hope couples can have a perfect marriage in such a place,” Chu said.

Nordic and Mediterranean destinations were also trending, along with theme and leisure-oriented travel. Linabel at Hong Kong Disneyland said packages sold out in the first 20 minutes. Memorial concerts for late pop icon Leslie Cheung in Hong Kong sold out in under a minute.

After living in a zero-covid strategy, Chinese consumers are mentally exhausted and stressed out and need to get out and experience the world — a sentiment that came through loud and clear at the two-hour event. For Chu, it was his first trip to Singapore since the pandemic, and he expressed his joy at seeing the city prosper and reconnecting with friends and colleagues.

“The psychology of the consumer is that they are looking for emotional value and convenience in travel,” he said.

Live streaming is launching in Asia.

Chai said Trip.com’s “Boss Live Show,” which was started by Chairman James Liang and has run 100 live shows, has been successful domestically, and the OTA is achieving similar success in overseas markets.

We ran one in Thailand in January and saw $6 million [gross merchandise volume] Reservations within three hours. It lasted from 8pm to midnight and we fielded 10-15 room upgrade requests from hotel partners. It looks like the live shows are still there, and we’ll run it as long as our partners and consumers want.

Chai also said he uses key opinion leaders (KOLs) and platforms such as Wechat and Baidu, as well as offline advertising. “We travel through different marketing channels to drive demand for overseas products. We try different ways to stimulate travel – for example, travel times where we encourage users to post photos and videos in the app, and travel trends where we share travel information points with our users.”

Chu said consumers were watching live broadcasts “hopefully” during the Covid period as they were unable to travel.

“Now they see the added benefit of being able to get real-time advice and recommendations with live hosts. Before going to an offline store, they can now do these things online. Seeing is believing and live streaming is an effective tool. For many new traders, live streaming is effective in starting a new business.” It’s a way.

Chu said on the platform, Flygy has 400 million users and 1 million live streams. “We’re doubling down on marketing resources to help hard-hit merchants.”

Competition is good for innovation.

Over the course of several sessions, one social media app name has been emerging – Little Red Book/Xiaohongshu, which is taking the country by storm. It allows users to find and share information about local businesses and its target demographic is mostly urban women between the ages of 18 and 35. Invested by Alibaba and Tencent, the latest data shows that it has 202 million monthly active users, 72% from the post-90s and 50% distributed in first-tier cities or large areas such as second/third-tier city governments.

According to Sean Tan, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer of Pan Pacific Hotels Group, when the newly opened Pan Pacific London decided to try Little Red Book to engage customers in its restaurants, in the first two months, 90% of its customers came from the app.

The hotel group has now launched a Little Red Book store, similar to stores on Fliggy and Wechat, and “it’s been amazing since it launched,” Tan said.

Tan, who heads marketing and sales for Jinjiang International Hotels, says deep localization is key to winning in the Chinese market and has spent more than three years building Pan Pacific’s e-commerce ecosystem in China.

In 2018, we said we will build a WeChat platform to help our hotels. Most hotels have an official Wechat account, and this is more for communication. We want our customers to complete the entire journey. You can search in a small program, but then how do you handle it? Then we looked at the calendar booking function. Then we launched a Wechat shopping center to grab vouchers and coupons. It took us two years to build these activities. We have done the same thing with Fligim.

Duyin is also enjoying the same growth domestically as TikTok is doing globally. As Chai said, “If there was anyone who hadn’t heard of TikTok before, they would have by now.” CEO Xu Zichew had to defend his company’s ties to China in recent disclosures in a congressional hearing.

Bytedance-owned apps are seeing strong growth in travel-related content, and its short videos are becoming a source of inspiration for a younger customer base in South-East Asia. Both have become strong options for customer acquisition beyond traditional search channels.

Chai cited Trip.com’s new TripGen, a chatbot built on OpenAI ChatGPT, which he says helps competing companies innovate. “We’ve been around for over 20 years and it’s because of our competition.”

Chu said it’s good to see travel-related content trending on social media platforms. “It shows optimism in travel. Travel technology companies like us innovate to create differentiated value – outbound travel has high value, and there’s a long process involved in selling. What we want to create is a high-quality end-to-end.”

The four S’s buyer customer behavior

Chai lists the four S’s that Trip.com uses to explain changes in customer behavior resulting from the pandemic. “For the last three years, it’s been about safety, and that’s still the main thing. Booking windows are still short and we expect it to be at capacity. We also see small groups – friends and families traveling together – and have requested our hotel parties’ child-friendly policies. And last but not least, sustainability – you’d be surprised but Gen Z customers want to support the environment.

Trip.com, McKinsey & Co. And Accor recently released a report titled “The Way to Eco-Friendly Travel in China,” which found that tourism accounts for an estimated 6-8 percent of mainland China’s total carbon emissions. Accommodation generates 60% of domestic travel emissions, largely due to high energy consumption. Aviation was the largest emitter in the transportation subsector, although only 1 percent of domestic trips involved flying. Shelter is responsible for the majority of water use from showering, bathing and washing. Waste is generated everywhere in travel.

Recent McKinsey Sustainable Travel Survey data shows that Chinese travelers are concerned about climate change and are beginning to look for sustainable alternatives. But they are unwilling to pay more for advanced travel solutions. Chinese tourists believe that climate-friendly travel is a shared responsibility for the government and industry to make tourism more sustainable.

According to the Chai report, “Through smart decisions and travel provider incentives, travelers can reduce their environmental footprint by 10-20% on a typical trip.”

Trip.com has partnered with climate-technology company Opt-Out to give travelers the option to calculate and offset a flight’s carbon footprint.

Local giants want to grow international wings

The desire for Chinese travel brands to expand internationally was there before the outbreak, but the past three years have certainly made it more important with the tough situation at home and intense competition at home. Indeed, in 2023 will be the year Chinese brands double down on international expansion, and this was evident at ITB Berlin when players such as Dida Travel, PK Fare and Flightroutes24, among others, were in full force.

We see both the geographical expansion and the sector. Chai Trip.com has been expanding into trains in the UK, Europe, Korea and Japan, as well as tours and activities and events such as concerts. Our mission is to provide travel products to consumers around the world.

Chu said that Alibaba has been a global business since its inception, and as such, Fligi must be global. “We started as a platform, enabling our partners and merchants to serve as a gateway to 1 billion customers. Our top priority is within the four-hour flight circle.”

Trip.com led the charge before the outbreak by acquiring Skyscanner and Travelfusion as well as MakeMyTrip. It remains to be seen how the others will handle it.

Meanwhile, the doors are wide open for the Chinese traveler, ready to explore the world again. Get ready, get ready, go.

*This story originally appeared on WebinTravel.