During this year's Spring Festival holidays, a record of 6 million Chinese travelers travled overseas, which is equivalent to all of the Danes traveling abroad at once. What's more, Chinese travelers spent nearly $14.5 billion(90 billion yuan) in their travel, which corresponds to every Chinese international travelers buying a Louis Vuitton handbag.
Source:The World Bank
In 2005 China ranked seventh in international tourism expenditure and from then on, Chinese outbound tourism boomed rapidly. It successfully overtook Italy, Japan, France and the United Kingdom.Year 2013 witnessed China leap to the first place, surpassing both top spender United States and second largest spender Germany.
According to China Tourism Research Institute, China had 120 million outbound visitors in 2015. They spent 104.5 billion U.S. dollars, which already far surpassed some countries' total household consumption expenditure. For example, Indonesia and Turkey.However, China's per capital travel expenditure ranks far behind other countries.
From the perspective of geographical convenience, countries like Japan, Korea and other southeast countries in Asia are always the most popular places for Chinese outbound travelers. Some of the reasons include: more airlines connect between China and these countries, it requires less time to apply for a visa, cheap but high-quality products.
Moreover, due to convenience of transportation, similar culture and special tourism policy, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, are the top cities for Chinese international travelers. Since the Chinese mainland government and Taiwan province exchanged written documents in 2011, mainlanders are allowed to visit Taiwan as individual tourists. This resulted in more and more young Chinese people traveling to Taiwan.
In China, the Millennial Generation has taken the stage. Compared to their parents, they have more passion to travel abroad to expand their horizons. Since they grew up in a comparatively affluent period, they are better- educated, open-minded, technologically sophisticated, and media savvy. Moreover, they like shopping and don’t worry much about money even when they have little of funds.
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During 2013 and 2014, Chinese outbound tourists were mainly from South China, North China and East China; Shanghai, Guangdong and Beijing have the most overseas tourists, followed by coastal provinces such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shandong. Liaoning in Northeast China, Hubei in Central China and Sichuan in Southwest China are provinces with a large tourist flow to other countries.Influenced by economic development, the regional distribution of Chinese international tourists reveals huge differences between eastern cities and western cities, and between inland cities and costal cities. As a result, the travelers from different areas of China have different international travel preferences, travel frequency and travel stories.
Regional Distribution of Chinese outbound tourists