COTRI weekly Editorial
NEW! Global Tourism Futures in China and around the world: Destination Heritage or Destination Future?
While many historic destinations in Europe continue to grow in popularity, they are forced to cope with overcrowding and all its associated negative social and environmental impacts. Consequently, these destinations mainly seem to focus on managing the influx of visitors, establishing visitor guidance systems...
24.07.2024
Global Tourism Futures: Destination Heritage or Destination Future?
While many historic destinations in Europe continue to grow in popularity, they are forced to cope with overcrowding and all its associated negative social and environmental impacts. Consequently, these destinations mainly seem to focus on managing the influx of visitors, establishing visitor guidance systems...
17.10.2024
The Third Plenum and China’s outbound tourism
After a long delay, the Third Plenary Session of the CCP’s 20th Central Committee meeting has been announced to be held in Beijing during July 15-18.After the death of Chairman Mao the 11th Party Congress of the CCP took place in August...
10.07.2024
Chinese customers spending more on outbound travel and less on luxury brand goods
Good news for the global tourism industry: China’s wealthy top 5% of the society is starting to reallocate budgets from buying luxury goods back to spending on outbound trips. China's luxury market experienced a strong rebound in 2023, but this trend seems to be over now...
26.06.2024
Chinese companies wasting millions of Euro with wrong marketing at UEFA EURO 2024
For football fans around the world and especially in Europe the long-awaited European football cup tournament has started. Chinese companies are visible as sponsors and advertising companies in a big way. However, they got it all wrong based on a lack of intercultural understanding...
20.06.2024
Anybody for Polo at 5.000 meters? Chinese tourism to Pakistan
The world is already experiencing again a record-breaking hot summer, in Europe and in Turkiye temperatures going beyond 40 degrees Celsius already in early June. In Athens, the Acropolis had to be closed temporarily. Mountain tourism can be an alternative, also for Chinese tourists...
13.06.2024
In the last few days, your humble editor had the honour to be invited to Kathmandu to conduct a series of capacity building workshops and trainings under the headline “Nepal Tourism 2.0”. As co-trainers our dear friends and colleagues Dr. Jens Thraenhart and Dr. Ali Said Akaak also found their way from Thailand and Oman respectively to the Park Village Resort Hotel, the venue of the event...
06.06.2024
Air connections regrowing and new measures to bring more visitors to China
Last week your humble editor had the honour to be invited to a webinar of OAG, talking about the future of aviation in Northeast Asia. While China is still not publishing detailed numbers for inbound and outbound travel, but only totals of border crossings with unclear definitions, the OAG numbers have a clear message. Domestically the passenger air transport capacity stayed 15% above the 2019 level in May 2024, one percent lower than in May 2023...
29.05.2024
GITF Conference – Global Tourism 2.0 relevant also for China’s outbound tourism
Last week COTRI and your humble editor had the honour to organise as part of the GITF Guangzhou International Travel Fair the China Outbound Tourism 2024 conference. During the conference a number of world-class experts shared with the audience their insights into the likely development of the global and especially the Chinese international tourism in the coming years under the global umbrella of demographic, de-globalisation and climate change challenges...
22.05.2024
Just a short editorial this week as your humble editor prepares to travel to China (via two workshop stops in Milan and Cairo) for the GITF Guangzhou International Travel Fair 2024. For the first time in more than 45 years I will enter China without the need for a visa...
07.05.2024
Modern behaviour amid continuing economic worries
One of the fixed common knowledge items about China is that food plays a vital role. Some Chinese friends used to tell me that Freud got it wrong: The most important thing in life is not sex but food: More variation, and free choice, can be enjoyed in old age, and experience can be shared with more people at the same time...
17.04.2024
The Three Bodies problem and Chinese outbound health tourism
Ten years ago the English translation of the first part of the Science Fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past by Liu Cixin was published, called The Three Bodies Problem, with the other two parts following shortly after. Originally, they had been published in China between 2006 and 2010, basically starting the genre in China...
10.04.2024
Investment in Chinese tourism and more overnight visitors in Hong Kong
Many China watchers are waiting for the big spending package to restart the Chinese economy, indeed waiting already for longer than most of them predicted. Last week we covered the reappearance of “Reform and Opening” and the announcement of Chairman Xi of comprehensive reforms on a scale not seen in the last ten years being in the pipeline, which again where not followed until now by concrete steps...
03.04.2024
China focusing on inbound tourism
This week finds your humble editor in his hometown Berlin for the annual gathering of everybody who is anybody in global tourism: ITB 2024, back from CoViD restrictions, but hampered by strikes by German train drivers and German airport staff. The Chinese exhibitors were back and so was “China Night”.....
08.03.2024
NEW! Everybody meets in Berlin
China is preparing for the “two sessions”, the annual law-making session, the tourism world is preparing for ITB Berlin. Both will happen in the coming week. China has come out of the festive mood of celebrating the Wood Dragon Years arrival...
29.02.2024
The Wood Dragon Year has started in China and everybody hopefully had a good time with family, friends, food and a lot of travelling. Some have used the relaxed atmosphere for surprising musings. A lot of nonsense has been published about all the positive influences of the Dragon in the coming year...
21.02.2024
On the fourth of the seven voyages of Admiral Zheng He’s “Treasure Fleet” in the early 15th century, Zheng met up in Bengal with envoys from Malindi, which is now part of Kenya. The men from Malindi had brought with them as tribute giraffes, and they gave one of those giraffes to the Chinese...
07.02.2024
one of the earliest viral marketing activities happened in 1991 when the caramel shortbread chocolate bar made by Mars changed its name in several European markets from Raider to Twix. Against all marketing wisdom that made the snack more popular than ever and “Raider is now Twix” become a commonly used expression...
31.01.2024
In 2019 your humble editor managed to clock up no less than 70 flights to four continents, followed by CoViD-19 years of more or less complete homestay. 2024 on the contrary started with eleven flights in three weeks, back to that pre-pandemic feeling...
24.01.2024
2023 has been confirmed by now to have been the hottest year on record and the new year immediately starting with record frost in Scandinavia, heatwaves in Australia and real high waves at the coast of California, while the area around the headquarter of COTRI in Hamburg was widely flooded by unprecedented levels of rainfall. In the USA, football games had to take place at temperatures of -20 degrees C.
17.01.2024
last year the Chinese government presented a big Christmas present to the Chinese citizens as well as to the global tourism industry. In the true spirit of “In China everything happens later but faster”, they were a day late, however...
14.12.2023
a few days ago COP28 started in Dubai. Even though the tourism industry is responsible for 10% of jobs and GDP globally and also for about the same percentage of global pollution, no representatives of the tourism industry are among the main speakers during the event...
06.12.2023
Will China save Swiss tourism again?
Your humble editor is back from the QTM 2023 in Doha, a place which has optimism build into its DNA. The government currently is in the news with regard to its role in the Palestine conflict, but it is also having big plans to create harmony between a sustainable development and the building of a crazy megacity...
29.11.2023
these days Qatar has entered for many the mental map for the first time with regard to the conflict in Palestine. The Emirate Qatar however has also been the venue for the QTM Qatar Travel Mart 2023 including an international tourism conference, which was chaired by your humble editor...
25.11.2023
China’s consumers want quality in shopping and travelling
Alibaba Group’s China commerce business Taobao and Tmall Group stated that value-for-money products and livestreaming proved popular among Chinese consumers during the 2023 Double 11 shopping festival. Artificial intelligence-powered tools helped the merchants to run more efficient marketing campaigns and to increase the gross merchandise value (GMV)...
15.11.2023
The role of Connectivity and Sustainability in China’s outbound tourism
The news are filled with pictures of suffering people in Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan and many other places, fit to create nightmares. Reports by scientists showing that the negative effects of global warming are developing faster than even the worst-case scenarios forecasted are not helping either to get into a holiday mood...
08.11.2023
The news are filled with pictures of suffering people in Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan and many other places, fit to create nightmares. Reports by scientists showing that the negative effects of global warming are developing faster than even the worst-case scenarios forecasted are not helping either to get into a holiday mood...
01.11.2023
COTRI weekly Editorial: VIP visitors in China
The 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative has created an influx of visitors to Beijing. Representatives of 150 countries and almost 40 international organisations filled the Great Hall of the People – and the government guest houses and five star hotels of the capital – listening to President Xi praising a “golden decade”...
19.10.2023
COTRI weekly Editorial: Young Chinese start to love lotteries
During three years, from 1844 to 1846, Évariste Régis Huc, C.M., a French Catholic priest of the Congregation of the Mission (Latin: Congregatio Missionis), went on a trip which resulted in the famous book Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China during the years 1844-5-6. His accounts of Qing-era China, Mongolia, and the....
12.10.2023
Dressing as you want – a new reason for Chinese to travel abroad
In January 1981, as a student in Hong Kong, your humble editor travelled to mainland China with his girlfriend on one of the very first individual visas issued. The first stop was Guangzhou railway station. The accompanying traveller, a German woman with obvious female attributes but very short hair, felt the need to use the toilet.
21.09.2023
Chinese are moving and so is COTRI weekly Editorial
The Chinese outbound market is gaining speed. Singapore not only welcomed in July 2023 more than double the number of Chinese visitors compared to one month before, the 231,330 arrivals also represented 60% of the 2019 level and, more importantly, stayed on average four nights instead of three nights.
12.09.2023
The last successful emperor
If you want to impress your Chinese visitors or business partners, tell them who your favoured Chinese emperor is. They will congratulate you on your detailed knowledge of Chinese history and may even start a discussion among themselves...
27.07.2023
Heat and the Arab world
During a China workshop in southern Italy earlier this year, your humble editor discussed with participants how temperatures of nearly 50 degrees Celsius in 2022 will mean an end to the typical summer beach season that is so important to them...
20.07.2023
Highway to Hell or Highway to Heaven – Example Nepal
All over the world lip service is paid by tourism leaders for a move from quantity to quality in tourism and hospitality. However, in the attempt to reach as fast as possible the 2019 arrival numbers again, the reality often looks very different...
13.07.2023
100 million Chinese own 93% of all the wealth in China
Watching the news about China's image, most of the time we see megacities full of skyscrapers and multi-lane highways. Chinese tourists are typically portrayed as buying luxury brands in every city they visit. Indeed, more than half of China's...
06.07.2023
Slow start but wave building up
The first half of 2023 is almost over and many tourism and hospitality service providers around the world are disappointed about the slow start of China’s outbound tourism...
29.06.2023
It is called Pickleball – but why?
Almost 60 years ago, some outdoor game fans in Washington state developed a new game in their backyard, a combination of tennis, badminton and table tennis, played on a field the size of a badminton court with paddles that look like...
22.06.2023
An argument in favour of engaging with the Chinese outbound tourism source market
Your humble editor returned to Germany after a month in China and Nepal, filled with wonderful personal meetings at four conferences and fairs. Finally, no more Zoom and additionally mangos, Masala Dosas, Jiaozi, Momos and Gurkha beer...
15.06.2023
It is finished!
Of course, we do not want in any way to compare the publication of the first issue of COTMI China Outbound Tourism Market Intelligence with the momentous events described in the Bible, with “It is finished” according to...
09.06.2023