COTRI, the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute, will unveil details of Advantage: Tourism (A:T), a Covid-19 recovery and resilience programme, in a hybrid summit organised by the Global Tourism Forum Institute on November 27.
Wolfgang Arlt, COTRI founder and CEO, will be speaking on A:T at the summit, and COTRI will be conducting a masterclass on how to restart Chinese outbound tourism for the Asian market on December 8.
A:T partners, Arlt said, include Trend Transfer, an experienced incubator for ideas and connections for destinations; Stocastic.World, thought leader in innovation and value production; Landways International, a leading tour operator for Chinese visitors to South-east Europe; Planet Payment, Tencent Cloud Europe and TCI Research.
Arlt, who is programme lead, said A:T aims to address the significant changes in how Chinese travellers will travel, work, eat, sleep and spend their money after the end of the Covid-19 crisis.
A:T, he noted, is based on enhancing customer experience and satisfaction, transforming the focus on generating visitor arrival numbers to concentrate on local value creation and developing sustainable and qualitative KPIs of sentiment and satisfaction.
This is to be achieved by using finely tuned product adaptation based on increased knowledge to create recommendation marketing, spending money on empowerment of local stakeholders instead of huge amounts on unspecific social media marketing.
He continued: “The need to react to the challenges of overtourism, climate change, decreasing margins and decreasing levels of satisfaction of travellers, staff and locals alike, which were growing even before the virus struck, still exists.
“Decades of unreflected growth have shifted away from the priority for local welfare and KPIs addressing sustainability. There is not really a destination where this does not apply. Accordingly, even before the pandemic, many destinations have been approaching COTRI for support in moving upmarket, towards tourism which is less superficial and less discount-price oriented.
“The answer depends obviously on local strengths and the local situation, but generally speaking, there is a need for tailor-made products and services for different segments of the Chinese outbound market.
“Affluent families with children from Beijing have different interests and needs compared to a group of young foodies, who studied abroad from Shanghai, or a retired couple from Guangzhou looking for a spa holiday.
“Themed tours for Chinese with special interests can take visitors to less frequented parts of the destination and low-season times of the year. There is no need to be afraid of niches – with digitalisation, recommendation marketing and well-trained staff now, opportunities can be created as many niches in China still concern millions of potential customers.”
According to Arlt, Chinese outbound tourists travel mostly not just to relax, but to gain experiences, learn new skills from sailing to music or cooking, to meet friendly locals and to enjoy nature and landscapes.
Finding new distribution partners in China, he added, can go beyond tour operators. Twin-city relations can be used for exchanges of school children or urban planners, universities, hiking associations, retailers of outdoor equipment, and VIP clubs of banks are all possible partners if the right itinerary is offered.
He opined: “Volunteer tourism will become more important for young Chinese and also government initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative and the Greater Bay Area programme will have positive effects for creating different forms of tourism from China to Asian countries.
Arlt believed that better quality, leading to more satisfied Chinese visitors, will allow for concentration on satisfaction marketing, “saving a lot of the budgets now spent on social media marketing with often dubious results”.
WWF, in cooperation with GlobeScan, recently released the findings of an extensive study conducted to understand the main drivers and motivations of Chinese outbound travellers to purchase ivory products abroad and suggest targeted interventions to curtail demand among this group of travellers once international travel resumes in the new normal.
The study, which was conducted between August 2019 and January 2020, surveyed 3,011 outbound Chinese travellers to Cambodia, Hong Kong, Japan, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam in the previous two years.
The results revealed that one in 10 Chinese travellers (11 per cent) had planned to purchase ivory prior to their trip. This was especially true for those travelling to Thailand (21 per cent), Japan (19 per cent), and Hong Kong (17 per cent).
More than half the people who reported buying ivory said they did so as a gift for a friend or family member, while a quarter did so as a gift for a business relation, shared Daniel Bergin, senior project manager, GlobeScan, when presenting the results via Zoom on November 10.
He also shared that 22 per cent of surveyed travellers had someone recommend visiting an ivory retailer, with almost a quarter of travellers having visited at least one shop that sold ivory.
Recommendations to visit these shops were mostly given by local tour guides (60 per cent) and staff at tourist information centres (37 per cent).
Karen Xue, director of WWF’s Ivory Initiative, shared: “The fact that ivory purchases are being facilitated by those working in the travel and tourism industry in destination countries is worrying, but also presents a good opportunity for targeted interventions.
“If we can change the behaviour of these tourism sector actors, we can greatly reduce the chances that travellers have to purchase ivory while abroad.”
When assessing the authenticity of the ivory, nearly half of the travellers surveyed (47 per cent) relied on authenticating documents provided by the sellers to determine if the ivory was real.
Of those that bought ivory, 44 per cent of consumers mailed it home to mainland China, either personally or through the retailer, while 28 per cent carried it back with them.
Jan Vertefeuille, senior advisor on advocacy in wildlife conservation for WWF, said: “These findings show that creative demand reduction efforts and interventions with the private sector are key if we want to keep Chinese outbound travellers from taking ivory home.
“If we can discredit the documentation that identifies ivory as ‘authentic’ or get courier companies to cooperate with our counter wildlife trafficking efforts, we can disrupt the flow of elephant ivory into China.”
Another key finding of the report revealed that 17 per cent of Chinese outbound travellers think it is legal to bring ivory back to mainland China.
Thus, among GlobeScan’s recommendations to WWF was to educate the Chinese public that it is illegal to transport ivory across borders under any circumstances and to have campaigns dissuading Chinese travellers from purchasing ivory.
Other recommendations included targeting courier and delivery companies in their campaigns to reduce illegal cross-border transportation as it has been found that sending ivory and rhino horn products by mail is the most popular method of transporting it back to mainland China.
As the Lunar New Year and Golden Week Holidays combined accounted for more than half the trips undertaken by outbound travellers to the seven destinations in the study, it was also recommended that campaigns be organised targeting these two peak periods.
GlobeScan also suggested devising campaigns against the practice of buying ivory as a gift. A poll conducted during the online unveiling of the findings where participants were asked what non-ivory, wildlife-friendly souvenir they thought would make a popular alternative saw the majority of respondents (44 per cent) voting for local artisan crafts, followed by gems and minerals (21 per cent).
This study builds on previous consumer surveys about the elephant ivory trade in China conducted by GlobeScan for WWF which looks at changes in attitudes and purchases since China banned its domestic ivory trade on December 31, 2017. Following this historic decision, WWF initiated a global initiative addressing the supply and demand of ivory products which is embedded in its multifaceted strategy to tackle the illegal wildlife trade around the world.