Andrew Aitken and Emma Bean, of Kiwi Encounter Rotorua were recently given the opportunity to go on a study tour of Guilin, China. The course was a joint venture between Tai Poutini Polytechnic, Ecotourism New Zealand, and Guilin Tourism University (GTU) in China, to learn about the Chinese tourism industry and what Chinese visitors are looking for when they travel to New Zealand.
Considering China only opened its doors to international visitors in 1997 and the government only actively supported outbound tourism from 2009, it is incredible to think that there are now 130 million outbound visitors travelling the world each year from China, New Zealand received approximately 400,000 Chinese visitors last year.
Tourism is now seen as a ‘Pillar Industry’ in China and there are almost one million people studying tourism across China. GTU has over 10,000 students and is the biggest tourism university in the world – so what better place to learn about Chinese outbound tourism, Chinese tourism industry development, the growth of online travel agencies in China and how we can incorporate the key insights into Ngāi Tahu products to improve the experience for our Chinese customers?
The programme was based in Guilin, one of China’s iconic tourism destinations and from here we visited several different areas, giving us as much perspective as possible on Chinese tourists and their expectations when travelling. The highlights were a cruise of the Li River to Yangzhou, with its incredible Karst landscape; visiting the Longji rice terraces; and a visit to the Guilin tea plantation, where we learnt about tea from picking the tips of the plants through to the art of a traditional tea ceremony.
We are still processing all that we have seen, and look forward to applying all that we learned to the repositioning of Rainbow Springs and to all Ngāi Tahu Tourism products.
One key observation was the regular use of phones (sometimes by the lecturer in the middle of a presentation) and their many uses, such as making payment for your food at a restaurant. This was certainly the biggest learning outcome – that we need to expand our payment systems and improve our online presence and get micro-blogging in Mandarin. The new phrase over there is not ‘word of mouth’ but ‘word of mouse’ as more people turn to online travel agencies and Trip Advisor equivalents to help create their travel itineraries.
We were also invited to many banquets and we ate lots of amazing food. China is such a welcoming country and we look forward to returning some of the hospitality when some of our new-found friends visit New Zealand later in the year. Overall, it was a fantastic opportunity to immerse ourselves in the Chinese culture and gain an insight into one of our most important customer markets.
We encourage anyone who is given the opportunity to travel to China, to embrace it – xiè xiè (thank you).
Nā Emma Bean. Kiwi Encounter, Rainbow Springs.
Emma and Andrew at the Longji rice terraces.
The study tour group outside Guilin Tourism University.
