Analysing outbound tourism in China

To understand the trends of the outbound tourism, we should first pay attention to the socio-economic situation of the country. As we have heard many times, the situation of China in the global market is sharply growing at a very fast level. How did they get there? Let's go a little bit deeper on that.
If we analyse the situation of the country, we should stress the important changes that were done in 1978 thanks to the economic reform policy driven by the politic Deng Xiaoping. From that year, China experienced an openness in the main driving forces of an economy: agriculture, defense, technology and industry. This four-forces changes are based on the 'four modernizations' carried out in 1964 by the politician Zhou Enlai. It is easy to assume that if those factors previously mentioned are improved, the whole economy will boost and progress. It led to a modernization of the economy and it became the open door to the worldwide market. Since that moment, if we pay attention to the GDP growth rate it has been growing year by year since the eighties. Despite that fact, during the last years they could not avoid the impact of the global crisis and their growth rate slowed a litte, but did not stop.

The improvements of the situation of the country led to a better situation for the chinese population. Their level of income makes more affordable extra expenses, such as travelling. Also, in 2013 a new program called 'The Outline for National Tourism and Leisure (2013-2020)’, issued by the Government of China, aims to help all the chinese workers to live with better conditions at their jobs, have periods of free time adequately compensated with the proportional salary, and also to develop in a healthy way the tourism in China.
To corroborate the theory let's look at the numbers.

Although the biggest part of the population is settled in the range of earnings up to $20k, the next fragment is a 10.1% of the population who is earning between $20k and $35k. This amount of income allows those people to have more money to spend in holidays (for example). If we take into account that the total population in China in 2015 was of 1,374,620,000 people, a 10% of the population is a very interesting figure.
So it seems that all the factors take us to confirm that effectively, the chinese lifestyle is getting better and they want to open their eyes to the World.
Now, let's have a deeper look into how is the people who is travelling.
Based on the information that presented the online newspaper Hosteltur, I made a pie chart to illustrate better what the situation is.

Among the previous classification we should maybe stress the group that represents the 21% of the total: pleasure seekers. Those ones are the Millenials; it is, the new generation. The data shows that they spent the 27% of their income in trips. So could be great that the efforts to atract new tourits would be stressed on them.

It is the moment now to see where they travel.

As we can see on the chart above, the top trending destinations for the Chinese are in the Asia-Pacific region, standing out among them Seoul (South Korea). We do not find any city from other continent until the 10th postition, which is New York City, in North America. Finally, Europe ocuppies the two last postitions on the top 15 ranking.

It does not really mean much if we take into account that the trend of travelling is increasing in the chinese society and that they are willing to spend their money, and that is an opportunity. The figures show that they prefer large cities to visit. And the youngsters, who are the generation linked to the internet and new technologies, are the ones with more potential to be attracted.
So taking all the previous information into account, we could say that now Europe is in the perfect postition start a plan to attract all those potential travelers. Getting to know better their culture and their use of the social media could be a great advantage to start marketing campaigns to increase their desire to visit the Old Continent.

Helena Valero Jaroso

Sources
Deng Xiaoping, Wikipedia https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping

'China, 30 años de crecimiento económico' file:///C:/Users/helee/Downloads/Dialnet-China-2916327.pdf

Chinese GDP http://countryeconomy.com/gdp/china

UNWTO, 'China´s new national tourism strategy set to increase outbound tourism' http://media.unwto.org/press-release/2013-03-25/china-s-new-national-tourism-strategy-set-increase-outbound-tourism

Chinese population http://countryeconomy.com/demography/population/china

'Los 5 perfiles de turistas chinos' http://www.hosteltur.com/117246_cinco-perfiles-turista-chino.html

'The future of Chinese travel' https://www.ihgplc.com/chinesetravel/src/pdf/IHG_Future_Chinese_Travel.pdf