The benefits of doing business with China are plentiful and the opportunities for tourism vast. You will have heard the facts and figures about China being the largest travel source market in the world and the ever-expanding affluent middle class, hell-bent on having new experiences, visiting exciting destinations and spending their holiday money on posh perfume and desirable fashion labels. However, for many tourism brands, whilst the reasons to work with China are straightforward, the actual business of doing business can be complicated.
I recently attended the UK Inbound Annual Convention in Scotland where I met with dozens of sales and marketing professionals who were interested in attracting more Chinese tourists to visit their attractions, hotels and destinations. We talked a lot about the opportunity, but also discussed the barriers to achieving their objectives. Not everyone said exactly the same, but, broadly speaking, these were the top five challenges being faced.
1. Generating Results with the Travel Trade
There are lots of excellent opportunities to meet with Chinese tour operators and agents (sales missions, Visit Britain initiatives etc). Meetings generally seem really positive but some people told me that, once they get back to the office and send off those follow-up emails, they are receiving very few responses and find it hard to identify tangible results for their investment of time and money.
Read more about how to generate results with the Chinese travel trade.
2. Language Barriers
Many Chinese business men and women have a good command of the English language and some don’t. But even when language is structurally sound, pronunciation can still be a big issue, especially on telephone calls. It can be difficult to concentrate on trying to build a relationship, whilst selling your product and trying to understand each other all at the same time. As only one person I spoke to actually spoke any Mandarin, we are relying on our Chinese counterparts to speak English in nearly all cases.
Read more about overcoming language barriers.
3. Where to start?
China is a very big country with different customer segments, unfamiliar travel distribution structures, state and private media, and different social media and digital platforms. Most of the people I met with had some degree of uncertainty about where to start trying to make an impact. There was a healthy fear that they might not have a big enough budget to achieve cut through and a concern about where they should spend the budget they do have.
Read more about where to start.
4. We’re not ready and we don’t have the right product
I also spoke with some brands which didn’t feel they were ready for China. That was either because they didn’t feel they had the necessary infrastructure in place, that their businesses and staff were not geared up to deal with Chinese visitors, or that they weren’t on the right ‘Chinese tourist track’ with what they considered to be a desirable product. Some also said that they didn’t yet have any of their international marketing budget allocated to the Chinese market.
5. We don’t have time to do it properly
This I heard a lot. Taking a trip to China is a big investment, not only in monetary terms but, perhaps more importantly, in time. And one trip, once a year, is not enough to build those all-important relationships with the Chinese travel trade. On top of that, people felt more nervous about the Chinese market than they did about other international markets and were keen not to make any cultural faux pas. This meant more time, attending workshops, training and events to learn more about how to do business successfully with the Chinese.
Over the next few weeks, we will be addressing each of these Top Five Challenges here on our blog, digging a little deeper into the issues and making some practical suggestions on how to overcome these obstacles to achieve success in the Chinese travel market.
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