“Learn Chinese Well While Traveling China” Boosts Inbound Tourism Market

“Learn Chinese well while traveling China” has become a trendy choice for many young foreign tourists, which to some extent has heated up the inbound tourism market.

The Chinese Testing International Co. (CTI) and Chinese online travel agency Ctrip jointly invited young tourists of 21 countries to visit ancient Chinese capital cities, Beijing and Xi’an from December 18th to 23rd, which boosted the aforementioned trend.

The above activity is a part of the program “Travelling to China with Visa, Ctrip & HSK” sponsored by CTI, Ctrip and Visa international service association. The program is particularly designed for international Chinese learners from worldwide Confucius Institutes, facilitating a better and thorough understanding towards traditional Chinese culture and customs with culture-featured trips to the Great Wall, the Imperial Palace and the Terra Cotta Warrior Museum.

Quoted from National Tourism Administration, China received 69.5 million inbound tourists in the first half of the year, exceeding 62.03 million outbound tourists by 7.47 million, leaving a surplus on China’s international tourism industry. “Inbound tourism of China is shifting from the stage of recovery to sustainable increase, and outbound tourism is stepping into a period of stable increase from rapid increase.”

Against such background, travel giants quicken the steps of allocation and management in the inbound tourism market, and guarantee inbound tourists with good services and products.

“Ctrip and CTI, the branch company of Hanban, signed a strategic partnership agreement, aiming at exploring sinology and its relevant tourism products and arranging China tour for the foreign Chinese learners, which is an important strategy of Ctrip’s overall plan of inbound tourism market.”, said Zhong Qiang, Director of Ctrip’s International Division, claiming that, “Through cooperating with CTI, we hope that the Ctrip platform will be increasingly appealing to more inbound tourists.”

HSK offers its professional service to 6 million HSK candidates and 100 million of international Chinese learners. Li Peize, General Manager of CTI, introduced that CTI is a service provider sponsored by the Confucius Institute Headquarters (Hanban), which aims to offer the specialized services to foreign Chinese learners in the aspects of research and development of Chinese exams, exam organization and implementation as well as marketing promotion. HSK testing centers, including those in the Confucius Institutes, totaled over 1,000 home and abroad as of currently.

“The cooperation with Ctrip this time will provide better and thorough surplus services to users and potential users so as to satisfy their keen interest to explore Chinese culture”, said Zhang Yuan, Vice General Manager of CTI. Complying with the Belt and Road Initiative, CTI and Ctrip are going to issue more traveling programs for the global Chinese learners and HSK candidates, and provide them with more comprehensive examination services. Both are looking forward to conducting closer cooperation.

“With the implementation of the “Belt and Road” initiative, the inbound tourism is thriving as well. The year-on-year increase rate of inbound tourism doubled in 2017. The international communication and cooperation in inbound tourism are commonly seen”, Zhong Qiang said, “At present, Ctrip is implementing its global layout and will be more active in the inbound tourism market in the future”

It is reported that the recent cooperation between Ctrip and CTI mainly focuses on the thousands of foreign Chinese learners from overseas Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms as well as HSK testing centers and on jointly carrying out activities combining sinology with tourism, such as culture diffusion, marketing management and joint scientific research.

“Ctrip boasts rich customer and platform resources, as well as relatively mature global coverage. There are eighty percent of 25 million of foreign members are from overseas and over one million daily page views on Ctrip’s international websites”, Zhong Qiang said, “All of those are conductive to Ctrip’s cooperation with more enterprises in inbound tourism and contribute to the entire domestic tourist industry.

The data from tourism platforms showed that the inbound tourists choosing Changbai Mountain and Zhangjiajie as destinations have increased by more than 800％ in 2017; the booking of three star hotels is growing annually, whereas the booking of five star hotels is decreasing, clearly signifying that there are more younger tourists and they tend to go for leisure-oriented trips.

(Story by Jiang Tao, China News, Beijing, December 23rd)