Chinese Tourists

Tour in France now is a fast-growing part in China tourism. According to Atout France, more than 900,000 tourists from China visited France in 2011, growing at a rate of 25-30%.

It means, there will be 2 million tourists come to France in 2020 from China. And another report from AC nielsen shows that over 60% of the tourist get information from travel forums.

Travel Chinese Forums

Among these travel forums, Tuniu is the most popular one with 180,000 visitors everyday.

On this forum,there are two features to be noticed:

there are two types of articles: normal articles and articles labelled as “travel note”,

some writers get voucher for their articles,

as shown in the following chart:

The picture below shows the articles about French tour that Chinese toursits like:

1. It is obvious that those articles labelled as travel notes get far more comments and visits from Chinese tourists. For example, the least visit a travel note get is 1062 while the normal article gets most visits is about “Sex Museum” in Paris which gets 116 visits. Clearly, people are much more interested in experience from other people.

2. Tuniu gives all its vouchers to travel notes writers. It means Tuniu encourages people to write travel note.

3. The articles which are most visited are listed below:

Translation:

Tour 10 countries in Western Europe
Honeymoon tour in France, Switzerland and Italy
Tour in 10 European countries

Conclusion

What they have in common is they are all about travel in several countries. So tour in multiple European countries instead of only tour in France is much more attractive to Chinese tourists.

4. There are 5 articles with pictures and 4 of them get voucher from Tuniu. By contrast, among 9 articles without pictures, only 1 get voucher. It shows the great attention Tuniu puts on pictures or multimedia tools. (source cnr)

From the most popular travel forum in China, what Chinese tourists(especially tourists to France) are more likely to be influenced by:

other people’s experience
package offer with several countries in Europe
multimedia introduction.

Chinese tourism Agencies

For agencies who would like to attract Chinese customers, multi-media tools such as brochures and videos and stories from someone who already has experience can be very useful.

Read our article in Chinese on Sina Tourism