Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
11
THE CHINESE MARKET
China is at the center of the tourism gold rush. Everyone wants a piece of the action. Inter-
national hotel chains unimpressed with anemic economies in Europe and North America
are multiplying their properties in China every year. Young European, Asian and Americ-
an tourism professionals manage and train the Chinese in tourism. They stay within the
bounds set by the government tourism officials because the rewards can be stunning.
The wealth being accumulated is astronomical. As of 2011, China had 271 billionaires
and 960,000 millionaires. Asia now has more millionaires than Europe and could surpass
North America shortly. And tourism is one of the great cash cows for the Chinese economy;
by 2020, when China is expected to become the number-one destination, tourism will
provide over 10 percent of China's GDP. To keep up with all those tourists, China is expec-
ted to need 5,000 additional new passenger airplanes at a cost of $600 billion.
Typical of the tourism professionals lured to China is Javier Albar, a Spaniard with a de-
gree in hospitality from Oxford Brookes University in Great Britain. He has spent most of
his career in Asia, in South Korea and Hong Kong before becoming general manager of the
Beijing Marriott Hotel City Wall. It is Marriott's biggest hotel outside of the U.S., and when
I met him in Beijing in October 2011, he said he wouldn't want to be anywhere else.
“China is a different animal from any other country today,” he said. “It went through the
revolution of Mao Zedong and all of those terrible things. Mao actually did several good
things. He united the country and he set the ground for the growth of today. Now the coun-
try is becoming wealthy, the young are impatient; there are problems of expectations and
inequality; everyone wants to get ahead. After what has happened over the last thirty years,
who knows what will happen in the near future. The country is very alive. And I want to be
here.”
The first and most important requirement for doing well in the Chinese tourism industry
is having the right connections to the government. China is a one-party state where top of-
ficials, their cohorts and their children—known as princelings, or the “red nobility”—play
the decisive role in cutting through the bureaucracy to win the licenses and permissions
necessary to do business. In all areas the most important decisions are made behind closed
doors, a situation that has led to calls for better and more open legal structures and super-
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