The Chinese are very popular visitors, there are not many tourism boards who don’t covet the Chinese tourist however increasingly they are making the long trip to the UK for their vacations. This is likely to accelerate in the wake of President Xi Jinping’s recent state visit – the first in over a decade, which is expected to further improve Chinese-UK relations.
One of the reasons why the tourism industry values Chinese visitors is that they normally spend big. Many Chinese tourists are very keen on purchasing designer goods from UK’s premier brands. Some make long distance shopping trips using their many Chinese State holidays and festivals.
“China is the world’s biggest outbound market as well as a tremendous tourism chance for Britain. Chinese visitors have very favorable awareness of Britain,” VisitBritain CEO Sally Balcombe told Xinhua recently, saying they “remain more here than in our European rival destinations and are high spenders.”
“Every 22 additional Chinese visitors we bring support an additional occupation in tourism,” she added.
An latest report from her bureau revealed the variety of Chinese tourists to Britain in the very first half of 2015 reached a record 90,000, up 28 percent from 2014. Tourism officials are anticipating the absolute amount of Chinese visitors to reach more than 200,000 this year. Many Chinese are very interested in the UK routinely using VPNs to watch the BBC live like this.
Having become an important source of Britain’s greatest spending, each Chinese tourist spends a mean of 2,688 pounds (about 4,149 U.S. dollars), four times more than the typical, the report said.
Chinese visitors stay more in Britain with a typical vacation span of 10 nights compared with the average of six among all inbound visits and sometimes less in places like America, the VisitBritain report said.
They “make quite in-depth travel guides and request a couple of days especially for shopping, which means Chinese tourists will willingly spend more cash while traveling,” Wang Xiufu, supervisor of Elite UK Travel Ltd., a travel firm for high end Chinese customers, told Xinhua.
Moreover, Chinese students studying in Britain also have given to the tourism sector, as they travel the nation themselves across on vacations but in addition invite friends or their parents to come.
More than 150,000 Chinese pupils are studying in Britain, according to the Chinese embassy in London.
Further Reading
James Williams, BBC iPlayer Abroad, Faber Press, 2015.