GOLDEN WEEKS - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 224

ment” to eliminate most of the shadier practices. New Zealand had no choice. Tourism
was becoming the single largest export industry—ahead of even lamb and butter. If New
Zealand hadn't overhauled the Chinese tours, it could have infected the country's tourism
campaign, which markets itself with the slogan “100% Pure New Zealand.” In the end,
New Zealand recovered and the Chinese revived their opinion of travel there.
“It wasn't easy,” said Hickton, adding quickly that it was worth the effort, since China
has surpassed Japan as one of New Zealand's top sources of tourism, growing from 20,000
to 120,000 visits a year in the last decade.
China soon added other countries to its approved list. Each agreement required the
approval of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Public Security (the
national police) as well as the national tourism administration. Malta, Germany and Hun-
gary were the first European countries to join the list in 2002 and 2003. The next year
twenty-one European countries were added, including France, Belgium, Austria, Greece,
Italy, Norway and the Netherlands. By the end of the year African countries like Ethiopia
and Zimbabwe were approved to accept Chinese tour groups. By 2011 the list had grown
to 135 countries, including the United States and Canada.
Now the competition was on to woo the newly wealthy Chinese tourists. Several
European nations commissioned the U.N. Tourism Organization to undertake a study of
these Chinese outbound tourists. The findings confirmed many rumors about the Chinese
and added surprising details.
The profile that emerged confirmed the obvious: Chinese tourists live for shopping;
it takes up as much as 65 percent of their travel budget. They are so intent on buying
things that they are tightwads when it comes to paying for airfare or a hotel. They sign up
for cheap hotels in the suburbs and supereconomy airfare in order to spend more money
shopping. At the same time, they complain that those cheap hotels are far from the night-
life and that the food is lousy. Generally, they craved Chinese food when they were abroad.
Other than shopping, Chinese tourists enjoyed learning about famous European writers
and artists, especially visiting their homes that had been turned into museums: Claude
Monet's home in Giverny; Beethoven's home in Bonn. They liked the boulevard life of
lazy afternoons whiling away the hours at a café, getting lost in crowds along the grand
boulevards and seeing the art and architecture of Europe's great cities.
They shop for brand names, luxury clothes, jewelry, luggage and whisky, anything with
prestige. To that end, Chinese tourists are becoming the world's newest big spenders. The
money is impressive. Worldwide, Chinese tourists spent nearly $55 billion in 2011. This
level of spending can alter tourism markets. In France the steadily rising flow of Chinese
tourists has been the equivalent of a small stimulus package in the time of the global reces-
sion, with the Chinese spending over $900 million in 2011. Thanks in part to their travels,
the Chinese are learning to love wine—especially French wine—and have put China in
the top five wine-consuming countries in the world, besting even Great Britain.