By not actively promoting their properties ahead of the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival which took place last week, western hotels have missed a great window of opportunity for capturing the attention of international outbound Chinese tourists, according to DidaTravel.
The Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival is historically one of the busiest outbound tourism periods due to back-to-back national holidays: Mid-Autumn Festival and China National Day. This results in many Chinese citizens combining the national holiday days with work holidays to take one week off for holidays.
While the China outbound tourism market, in general, has yet to return to where it was pre-Covid, this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival could have provided an excellent opportunity for Western hotels to actively market themselves to Chinese audiences, and positioning themselves for the recovery.
Eric Zhuang, chief strategy officer at DidaTravel, shared: “This Mid-Autumn Festival period has been a big missed opportunity for most Western hotels as they have not yet reactivated their sales and marketing efforts when it comes to Chinese outbound travellers – they are basically risking missing out on the recovery which is already underway, allowing competitors to capture their market share.”
Reactivating China sales will require more than simply re-employing Chinese-speaking sales and marketing teams however, he noted.
“Technology plays an ever-increasing important role in reaching Chinese travellers via B2B2C sales distribution channels and such technology solutions have evolved significantly since 2019.”
Zhuang stressed that it is not as simple as switching “back on old tech solutions”, but to realise that the nature of the local sales market has also changed.
“Many B2B2C sellers are now selling in a very different way and thus require different types of content and pricing,” he added.
