Since my parents took my sister and me on a long road-trip holiday to Durban at the age of five, I have been hooked on traveling. Sure, there were times where my sister and I were pulling each others hair out while isolated from our parents on the back of the bakkie (pick-up truck) but the freedom from routine daily life and the exposure to everything new, new sights, new food, new culture, new friends etc., made it extremely memorable.
The first time I flew on an airplane was when I was 17 years old, on a direct flight from Cape Town to London where my friends and I worked arbitrary jobs for a year with the objective to travel the world. Some were more successful in meeting the objective than others but the foundation for a life of travel was established with snowboarding trips to Scotland, visits to European cities and a tour of 100% pure adventure to Pamplona for the running of the bulls in northern Spain.
It was during my travels as a university student that I first started to consider the impact that tourism as an industry has on the development of communities. The positive, developmental role was made crystal clear to me while travelling on a shoestring with the closest of friends to neighbouring Namibia and the Xhosa tribal lands of Transkei on South Africa’s east coast. The rural areas we travelled to had been completely overlooked by other commercial planning and its was inspirational to witness how these economically less fortunate communities benefitted from travellers who could hardly be described as wealthy. Since those days I have always tried to observe and analyse internally the impact that tourism has on the socio-economic development of communities. I am a strong believer that few industries nurture innate entrepreneurism at the community level better than tourism does. It not only gives dignity to disadvantaged individuals in the form of employment, but truly empowers families, clans, villages, towns and cities like no other.
Having lived in Beijing for over seven years I have had the enviable opportunity of using China as a springboard to travel to a multitude of near and neighbouring countries in addition to domestic China itself and have found the same spirit of entrepreneurism and social improvement throughout.
My career in the communications industry started in 2003 when the Managing Director of Weber Shandwick China, no doubt pitying me, offered me an internship, and some time later we landed our first travel destination client, The Bahamas. The passion of my personal life and my career finally collided and merged. Through my career I have been increasingly exposed to the role that upper end tourism plays on communities when large scale hotel & resort developments are established creating stable employment and nurturing advanced service training for larger numbers of local people’s. If implemented with a sensitivity to the environment and the local community’s social fabric, there can be no denying the beneficial influence these investments have for a country.
Over the years, by travelling to south-east Asian countries with my adventurous wife during China’s golden week holidays I have also had the opportunity to engage with and observe China’s growing outbound travellers. Watching them transform into a more mature market of travellers has been fascinating, especially when viewed in tandem with the other great consumer changes tearing up the past.
But why do I find China’s outbound travel & tourism so fascinating? Above and beyond the stellar growth that this particular industry is experiencing in a time of decline across the mature markets board, which should be sufficient reason, China’s outbound travel market is one of the few vehicles through which countries can narrow their trade deficits with China. The number of countries which have a trade surplus with China is limited to a handful of oil exporting and hi-tech nations and while the onus lies with trade deficit countries to modernise their economies, the reality is that few have the capacity to do so, especially developing countries lacking economies of scale.
Thankfully, after decades of being closed to the world, Chinese consumers are not only curious of foreign cultures but put their money where their mouth is and travel a considerable amount. The world is now their oyster and they do not seem to discriminate in terms of destination (so long as the destination is not too unsafe) or class of travel (from backpackers to 7 star hotels). In a nutshell, their interest to travel is there and the numbers will continue to experience significant growth so long as China’s economy continues to prosper, the only challenge that exists however is the competitive landscape of destinations and brands battling it out for China’s outbound travel market share, something that will only intensify with time, and this is were my job begins…
