DEL.ICIO.USUpdated: 10:24 a.m. November 26, 2008
Georgia woos Chinese tourists
Cox News Service
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
SHANGHAI, China - Shen Wu would like to see The World of Coca-Cola and the house where Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind, the movie version of which he saw growing up in northeastern China.
“I don’t know much about Atlanta, but it looks like a great city,” Shen, a 38-year-old travel agent, said as he flipped through a travel brochure in Shanghai, China’s financial hub. “I’d like to visit sometime.”
Craig Simons/Cox Newspapers
Georgia department of economic development official Stella Xu (seated at right, with the blue strap around her neck) meets with Chinese tour operators at the China International Travel Mart in Shanghai on Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008.
If Shen does travel to Atlanta, he will be part of a growing wave of Chinese tourists. Almost 400,000 Chinese visited the United States last year, a 59 percent jump from 2000, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.
Spurred by a June regulation change that allows travel agencies to offer packaged tours to the United States for the first time, the number of Chinese travelers could climb to 1 million by 2011, the New York-based Travel Industry Association estimates.
Like other states, Georgia sees the rising numbers as a golden opportunity within an otherwise bleak tourism sector.
While Georgia does not collect data on the nationality of tourists, anecdotal evidence from hotels and tourist sites suggests the state is benefiting from the surge even as the number of American and European tourists has fallen due to the financial crisis, said Kevin Langston, Georgia’s assistant commissioner for tourism.
“We’re just now seeing the first ripples of what will become a tidal wave of Chinese tourists,” said Langston, who traveled to Shanghai last week to promote Georgia at the China International Travel Mart, China’s largest tourism industry convention.
“We want to be sure we’re ready when that day comes,” he said.
The state and Atlanta have begun to lay out red carpets to entice more Chinese visitors. Last year the state’s department of economic development allocated roughly $100,000 — one-tenth of the tourism-promotion portion of its international marketing budget — for spending on China.
In September, both governments partnered with Delta to bring Chinese tour operators working in the United States to Georgia for an expenses-paid, five-day tour of hotels and top attractions. Next year, they plan to bring 60 Chinese tour company managers from China to Georgia.
Officials are also working with tour operators to craft itineraries to Chinese tastes. One tour might focus on Gone With the Wind, one of the first foreign movies released in China after Beijing loosened cultural restrictions in the 1970s. Atlanta’s visitors bureau is designing the itinerary to stop at the Gone With the Wind Museum in Clayton County, the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta and Oakland Cemetery, where Mitchell is buried.
“We have to be careful because we want to portray ourselves as a modern city, but in China, Gone With the Wind seems to work very well (for marketing),” Brandon Barnes, director of tourism for the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau, said in Shanghai.
Atlanta also hopes to connect with Chinese tourists by emphasizing its Olympic heritage - a bond with Beijing - and its importance to the civil rights movement, both of which Barnes said resonate with Chinese visitors.
But like the first wave of Japanese tourists to the United States in the early 1980s, most first-time Chinese tourists favor bigger cities and much of the payoff will take years to realize, experts said.
“Chinese all know New York and Los Angeles and Hawaii and that’s where they want to go on their first trip,” said Liu Lei, a Beijing manager for American Tours International. “Maybe on a second or third trip they would be interested in seeing Atlanta.”
Competing for tourists
Georgia is also competing against a growing number of states eager to attract China’s travelers. When Georgia officials participated in the China International Travel Mart last year, they were among 24 U.S. exhibitors. This year the number of U.S. booths ballooned to 150.
Las Vegas, one of several American cities that paid to market at the convention, ran a large booth complete with an Elvis impersonator. New York City tourism officials handed out Chinese-language brochures about the Empire State Building and other top destinations.
But if China’s outbound tourism tracks Japan’s growth, it will create enormous opportunities for Georgia, said Roger Dow, president of the Travel Industry Association.
Japan became the third-largest source of foreign tourists to the United States, behind Canada and Mexico, in 1990. The number of Japanese travelers has since fallen then but it remains a top source of tourism revenue.
Like Japanese travelers, Chinese tend to be high spenders: Average per visitor spending by Chinese traveling to the United States in 2006 was more than $6,000, according to the Commerce Department, the highest of any nationality.
And China’s 1.3 billion people multiply the potential profits. A June study by the Travel Industry Association estimates that by 2020 China will be the world’s fourth-largest “tourism generating market” with 100 million outbound trips.
“Around the world, everyone knows New York and Florida and Nevada, but after those places people will be looking for somewhere else to go,” Dow said. “If they learn about Georgia now, that’s where they’re likely to go.”
Georgia may also get first-time Chinese tourists flying through the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Delta began to offer a direct flight to Shanghai last spring and state officials hope to entice some Chinese visitors to stay “for several days on the front or back end of their trips,” Langston said.
In the bigger picture, officials hope growing tourism will promote deeper trade links with China.
The state government lobbied Washington to win the Delta flight to Shanghai and Gov. Sonny Perdue has visited China two times this year. The department of economic development also opened an office in Beijing in March to promote closer ties.
Attracting more tourists would feed into a virtuous cycle of investment and tourism, Langston said.
“Our biggest challenge at this point is (how to get) more visibility,” he said. “We have to build the relationship over time.”
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