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.