Asian middle-class gets travel habit
Asian middle-class gets travel habit
By Johnny Erling
BEIJING (DPA): A young Chinese couple are poring over the
state travel agency's holiday brochures. Liu Zhang knows what he
wants: to honeymoon abroad with his wife. That is the trendy
thing to do, and as a restaurant owner he can afford it. The
holiday that interests him is 12 days in Australia for 20,000
yuan, or US$2,325.
Liu has all the documents at the ready: his identity card and
passport photographs, proof of registration as a Beijing
resident, the letter of recommendation from the street committee
which he, as an entrepreneur, needs, and the corresponding letter
from his bride's public-sector employer. All they now need are
passports, and the travel agency could soon arrange for them to
be issued -- were it not for their age.
Liu is not 35 yet, and that is the minimum age set by the
Chinese authorities for travel to Australia and Europe. You have
to be 40 before you can travel to the United States as a tourist.
Before this age limit was set, too many Chinese tourists did not
come back.
"Why don't you travel to Xinmatai?" he is asked. There is no
age limit for Xin (Singapore), Ma (Malaysia) or Tai (Thailand).
China's new Asian travel boom began in the early 1990s.
By 2000, the Asian-Pacific Travel Association estimates, there
should be twice as many tourists in the region as there were last
year, when intra-regional tourism totaled 85 million travelers.
But the figure could easily increase even faster. Asia's
middle class has the travel bug, and the middle class already
number millions in countries such as India and China and the
tiger states Malaysia and Indonesia, which between them total
well over two billion people.
The Lius decide in favor of a 15-day group tour of Thailand,
Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macao for 10,800 yuan, roughly
$1,280. That is less than a holiday in Australia, and a holiday
in the United States or Europe (a 16-day tour of seven European
Union countries) would have cost times three times as much.
In 1996 sixty percent of travel from China to other Asian
countries was holidays and 40 percent business trips. As recently
as in 1994 it was the other way round. Chinese newspapers are
full of travel offers, with private travel to Europe, the United
States and Australia on the increase too (often in the guise of
excursions or professional tours).
For two years the German embassy in Beijing has been handling
direct applications for tourist visas. While there are only a few
hundred applications to visit Germany, thousands apply to visit
the United States. Last year 54,000 Chinese tourists visited
Australia, and by 2000 their number is expected to increase
tenfold.
Over the past five years the numbers of Chinese foreign
travelers have skyrocketed, while application procedures have
been increasingly simplified. Last year 5,060,000 Chinese
tourists traveled abroad, including 2,430,000 private travelers.
One in three (1,640,000) booked at a travel agency. Last year
246 licensed travel agents handled foreign tours from China.
Thousands more offered tours unofficially. For tourists that was
ideal because prices fell fast.
Foreign travel agencies are trying to make inroads into the
closed Chinese market. They know that China will have to
deregulate the travel market, among others, if it wants to
succeed in its bid to join the World Trade Organization.
For the time being, however, Beijing is stalling. From July
China plans to re-regulate the travel business, with only about
50 state travel agencies being authorized to offer and sell
foreign tours.
Quotas are to be imposed with a view to freezing the number of
tours at the 1996 level and to limiting travel to Southeast Asia
(and no longer offering holidays in Europe or the United States).
That, the Chinese authorities say, is the only way in which
China, as a developing country, can halt the swift outflow of
foreign exchange, improve the quality of holidays offered and
prevent the new consumer trend toward luxury foreign tours from
getting out of hand.