World Travel Online

World Travel Online

Home > News >
Chinese, Spending Freely, Become Ever-Larger Tourism Force in New York
New York City’s tourism officials have solved the riddle of how to attract the Chinese. The challenge now may lie in impressing them once they arrive.
Chinese tourists on a New York tour boat on Friday. China has become the
No. 2 source of foreign tourists in the city, behind only Britain.
 
New York City’s tourism officials have solved the riddle of how to attract the Chinese. The challenge now may lie in impressing them once they arrive.

Chinese tourists, who have been flocking to New York in rising numbers for a decade, accounted for nearly one million of the record 60.3 million visitors to the city in 2016, city officials said. But some, like Li Chen, a retired bureaucrat from Beijing, are far from awed by the scale of America’s biggest city.

Mr. Chen said he and the five friends he was sightseeing with on Friday expected New York to have taller buildings and wider streets. They were also disappointed that they could not get a look inside the New York Stock Exchange.

“We don’t want to just see the door,” Mr. Chen said through an interpreter while sipping hot tea on a cruise of New York Harbor operated by Hornblower New York. “Closing the door is like closing the door to prosperity.”
 
Hornblower bills the tour as international, but the narration piped through the speakers is only in English and Mandarin. Visitors from China are easily the largest group of foreign tourists on Hornblower’s tours, said Zichao Xie, the company’s international sightseeing manager. Ms. Xie said the company carried about 300,000 Chinese passengers this year, accounting for about one-quarter of its revenue.

The Chinese surpassed Brazilians and Canadians in the ranks of tourists to the city this year and will overtake the British by 2022, said Fred Dixon, the chief executive of NYC & Company, the city’s tourism marketer.

He said the city had more than 950,000 visitors from China this year, a sevenfold increase since 2007. Back then, more than 15 countries, including Switzerland and Israel, sent more tourists to New York than China did, according to NYC & Company’s statistics. In 2016, only visitors from Britain outnumbered the Chinese — and their total of about 1.2 million has not grown since 2007.

The Chinese still travel mostly in groups, moving around on chartered buses and often staying in hotels outside the city, Ms. Xie said. But Mr. Dixon said his organization had begun to focus on attracting more Chinese tourists traveling on their own or in small groups like Mr. Chen’s.

Those men flew from Shanghai with a larger group but broke off from it and were staying in a hotel in Lower Manhattan. They planned to go uptown to shop on Fifth Avenue, then head on Saturday to the Woodbury Common outlet mall, one of the most popular excursions for Chinese tourists, about 50 miles north of the city.
 
Tourists on a cruise of New York Harbor on Friday. Their numbers
in the city surpassed those of Brazilians and Canadians this year.
 
“That individual travel market is the biggest opportunity,” Mr. Dixon said. “That’s the future of the Chinese market.”

Emily Rafferty, chairwoman of NYC & Company, said she had recently attended a conference in Shenzhen, China, and met a group of local university students. “They were all wanting to come over to America,” Ms. Rafferty said. “The number of people under the age of 35 there is huge.”

At the Museum of Chinese in America, on Centre Street in Manhattan, the boom in Chinese tourism has not really paid off yet. The president of the museum, Nancy Yao Maasbach, said the tourists tended to stick to the best-known destinations.

“Our strategy has actually been that the more popular we become in the U.S., the more popular we will become to Chinese tourists,” Ms. Maasbach said.

Mr. Dixon said the Chinese were still spending freely, while visitors from Europe were cutting back as the dollar strengthened and reduced the buying power of the euro and other currencies. He said NYC & Company had begun emphasizing value and bargains in some of its advertising to the British and other Europeans, including a campaign this winter called “See It for Yourself,” in partnership with British Airways.

Those audiences might be easier to impress, judging by the reactions of Tony Neville and James Hopkinson, two first-time visitors from Yorkshire, England, who fit in some sightseeing on Friday after completing a work project. Mr. Neville, 36, said New York was bigger than he had imagined.

“This just blows London out of the water, to me,” he said.

Mr. Hopkinson said they had been surprised by how friendly, well mannered and courteous the local people they encountered had been. They even liked the American beers they had found, he said, sipping from a can of Brooklyn Lager.

Alicia Glen, the deputy mayor responsible for economic development, said Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration wanted to diversify the city’s tourist base so that it could weather economic downturns in Europe. Toward that end, the city increased its contribution to NYC & Company’s budget this year by $3.5 million, to about $21 million, she said.

Promoting tourism is an investment aimed at attracting visitors to spend money and at creating jobs, especially for less-skilled workers, Ms. Glen said. She said she tried to help out last week when she was on a plane full of Chileans flying to New York from South America.

Ms. Glen said that the Chileans had been excited to visit the new Whitney Museum of American Art and to walk on the High Line in Manhattan, but that she had tried to persuade them to try the Brooklyn Museum, too.

“They used to go to Miami all the time,” she said of Chileans. “But Miami is so over.”
  Source: New York Times

Please contact us in case of Copyright Infringement of the photo sourced from the internet, we will remove it within 24 hours.

Relevant Information

Travel Fair Review

more

Complete and Value Added Marketing Activities in China

Most cost effective E-marketing to the entire outbound travel trade:

Fam Trips and Hosted Buyers:

PR and Marketing Events:

Multi Media Reports:

Webinar Online Education Program:

Specialist Training Program: