Features of the outbound tourist market of China in the current realities

Abstract

Over the recent decades, China has built an economic foundation enabling its citizens to travel. During this time, the numbers of tourists from the People’s Republic of China increased by several times, and therefore the Chinese tourists have a great role on the global stage. China’s progressive, superlarge outbound market is becoming appealing to other countries. The Chinese tourist is different from the standard «Western» tourist, and thus their thinking and preferences should be understood better. A literary analysis of scientific researches of the Chinese tourism demonstrated the interest to this topic growing since the 2010s. The majority of researchers, practitioners in tourism, and representatives of state administrations and specialists of professional tourism institutions agree that the Chinese tourism market has a hyper-potential and is developing hyper-dynamically. However, if the scientific reviews of the last decade focused only on the research dealing with geography where the Chinese travel and dynamics of the Chinese outbound tourism, modern works contain a deep understanding of the behavior and experience of the Chinese tourists and highlight the negative aspects of Chinese mass tourism. The objective of this study was analyzing the Chinese outbound market, its features and opportunities to increase the flow of Chinese tourists. For those purposes, it is necessary to carry out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Chinese outbound tourist market; to form a portrait of the average Chinese tourist; identify negative and positive features of the Chinese mass tourism. That is why the paper analyzed the position of the Chinese outbound tourism on the global market based on such indicators as the number of outbound tourists and tourists’ expenditures. The paper presents the geography of tourist visits by the Chinese and the share of Chinese tourists in the structure of tourists of the world’s most visited destination cities. The portrait of the average Chinese tourist has been specified in terms of age, gender, education, income level, average spend receipt, length of stay during the trip, motives and reasons for the visit. We analyzed the influence of the Chinese mass tourism. The results of the research can be used in practice by tourism enterprises when designing marketing projects aimed at the Chinese consumer, as well as when forming new products for tourists from the PRC.