GOLDEN WEEKS - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 223

in groups with Chinese tour operators and deposit at least $3,000 in cash as a surety bond
that they would return to China. Those first years, some Chinese were “lost” and didn't
get back on the airplane. When that happened, the tour company was warned it could be
removed from the Chinese government's approved list.
Australia and New Zealand were the first two countries to win “approved destination”
status to receive these first Chinese tourists, a privilege that turned out to be a mixed bless-
ing. They accepted China's special visas for tour groups and were willing to work with the
Chinese tour operators that brought them over and organized their trips in a program en-
titled “Provisional Regulation on the Management of Outbound Travel by Chinese Cit-
izens at Their Own Expense.” The program was full of missteps those first years and the
Chinese bureaucracy was horrendous. The Chinese tour operators were often cutthroat.
And those Chinese tourists weren't sure what they were supposed to do in these foreign
countries.
Australia and New Zealand were the guinea pigs for the rest of the world. George Hick-
ton was the brand-new CEO of Tourism New Zealand those first years of the experiment.
New Zealand was experiencing an explosion of tourism—growing by 60 percent from
1999 to 2009 after long-haul airplanes were able to fly directly to the island nation from
the United States.
It was a remarkable era, and Hickton found himself in the role of educating these
Chinese tourist consumers and reining in the cut-rate Chinese tour operators. Hickton
smiled when remembering the headaches of those years—a Chinese opera of naive tour-
ists exploited by tour groups who acted like pirates, cheating their countrymen and women
at every turn.
“They brought in low-market tourism at the cheapest price and gave them the worst
experience,” he said.
The rip-off began with the price. Many tour-bus operators charged less than $50 a day
to attract as many tourists as possible. But $50 didn't go far in New Zealand. So instead
of seeing New Zealand's breathtaking landscapes and fine vistas, many of these Chinese
tourists were holed up in uninspiring hotels and fed miserably. They were shuttled around
in crowded buses to shopping emporiums where they were strongly encouraged to buy
tacky souvenirs because the tour operator got a commission from the sales. After a few
years of such tours, New Zealand had earned a poor reputation among Chinese tourists.
Hickton said he and the New Zealand tourism agency were concerned that they had no
control over the questionable Chinese tour operators who won the concession to run these
lucrative overseas tours from the Chinese government's tourism bureau.
“We couldn't afford to be swamped by the high volume of poor tours,” he told me when
we met at a tourism conference. “We had to reject a few of the Chinese tour operators.”
New Zealand's only recourse was to renegotiate the tourism agreement with China,
resulting in a new 2010 “code of conduct” that revised the “approved destination agree-