Basic Infrastructure News
- Beijing News
Date: 21-Jun-2007 Sources: (Shenzhen Daily)
A SURGE in tourism and domestic travel on the mainland will create jobs and boost consumption but also pose a challenge as the country struggles to provide the necessary infrastructure, tourism officials said.
The mainland welcomed 124 million visitors in 2006, including travellers from Hong Kong who accounted for more than half, and earned US$33.5 billion from tourism, the China National Tourist Office said.
By 2015 it is set to become the world's top tourist destination, attracting 200 million visitors annually.
Growth, however, is already creating surging demand for hotels, transport and other tourism-related services, which is aggravated by rising domestic tourism, officials said.
'We're putting an emphasis on tourism so we can increase domestic consumption and increase living standards,'Shao Qiwei, chairman of the China National Tourism Administration, told a conference in Hong Kong earlier this week.
The government has targeted growth in domestic consumption as a way to balance its economy and reduce its reliance on exports.
Growth in tourism will create more than 18 million jobs on the mainland in the next decade, according to Pacific Asia Travel Association, including much-needed jobs in rural areas where the government is encouraging tourism projects.
Shao said that, while Americans travel on average seven times a year, Chinese now make only one domestic trip a year, but that would probably rise to two within a decade, or 2.6 billion trips.
'Vacation travelling is becoming a trend,'Shao said. 'But there's an imbalance between supply and demand. We don't have enough trained staff and we are nowhere near able to meet demand for tourism services.'
International hotel chains such as Holiday Inn, owned by InterContinental Hotels Group, are expanding fast.
Holiday Inn plans to nearly double the number of its hotels in China to 125 by the end of next year, according to domestic media, while Accor, Europe's largest hotelier, aims to have up to 160 hotels in operation or under development in the country by 2010, up from 103 at present.
A potential oversupply of luxury hotels in Beijing and Shanghai is prompting hoteliers to switch their focus to the lower end of the market and to smaller up-and-coming cities, but development may not be fast enough.
Next year's Beijing Olympic Games is expected to generate a tourism boom on the mainland with half a million foreign and domestic visitors expected to arrive in the capital alone each day for 17 days when the event kicks off Aug. 8.
Some of the top hotels are already fully booked.
Rising domestic travel is creating other problems. Six years ago, the government introduced three weeklong public holidays to celebrate the lunar New Year, Labor Day in May and Chinese national day in October, as a way to boost domestic spending.
Hotels and transport systems are now under such pressure during those periods, however, that some government officials have suggested the holidays be scrapped.
Tourism officials said quality control was also a concern. More than 13,000 hotels on the mainland are classified by stars but stricter rules are required in setting those standards, they said.
'The two-star hotels you see on the mainland are not comparable with two-star hotels in Europe,'Xu Jing, Asia-Pacific representative at the World Tourism Organization, said.
The government is expected to allow foreign travel agencies this year to set up subsidiaries on the mainland and Shao said it also aimed to make travel insurance better established among domestic travellers.
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