A
one-day high-level workshop within the China Outbound Travel
and Tourism Market (COTTM) offers the opportunity for tourism
officials and company leaders to explore business opportunities
and to discuss their first experiences in China's outbound
tourism. The China
Outbound Tourism Workshop is jointly hosted by The Hong Kong
Polytechnic University's School of Hotel & Tourism Management
and the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute (COTRI).
During the Workshop discussion will take place in small groups
and will concentrate on the real experiences and plans of
the participants like strategies, marketing plans, product
adaptation, and regional cooperation, and others.
The experts participating
in the Workshop include Prof. Wolfgang Georg Arlt, author
of the book China's Outbound Tourism (Routledge,
2006); and Prof. Amy Chan, Dr. Hanqin Zhang and Mr. Tony Tse
of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Background:
Chinese outbound tourists
are developing into an important source market for many destinations
worldwide. The People's Republic of China is already the No.
1 international tourists generating country in Asia with close
to 40 million outbound travels expected for 2007.
The rapid growth in outbound
travelers from Mainland China of the first years of the 21st
century was therefore greeted with much enthusiasm and often
exaggerated expectations about the "millions" of
Chinese visitors just around the corner.
However, as these expectations
could not be fulfilled, the hype was often replaced by a "China
blues" in 2005/2006, ignoring the steady rise of visitors
from China to almost all destinations.
In 2007, ten years after the start of outbound leisure tourism
from China, the tourism industry is finally in a position
to look realistically at the development of the Chinese outbound
market and to draw conclusions from the activities and experiences
for this new and different segment of customers.
The China Outbound Tourism Workshop during COTTM offers the
chance to share experiences and to discuss new plans and activities
with some of the leading academic experts in the field, putting
the new realistic approach to good use for understanding past
results and for evaluating new developments.
Each unit will start with
a brief introduction by one of the experts, followed by in-depth
discussion and analysis of the market from three different
perspectives: government policies, customers' expectations
and behavior and marketing activities. The examples are not
taken from textbooks but from the practical experiences of
the participants.
Newcomers will learn to avoid
beginners mistakes, companies and destinations already working
in the market will have a valuable opportunity to understand
why some of their measures worked better than others. |