China's travel market is exploding; a recent survey forecasts there will be 70,000 new first-time travellers a day (25 million a year) for the next decade. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) also says that China’s travel sector will have climbed from sixth largest in the world from 2008, to second largest after the US by 2013.
 

By 2020, a quarter of all international travellers arriving in Japan and South Korea will be from China, says BCG; Chinese travellers in Europe will have quadrupled, and in North America they will rank third among all international arrivals.

Outbound departures are expected to increase 13% this year to 65 million, says the China Tourism Authority (CTA) - thanks to rising incomes, a bustling economy, stronger RMB, an easier tourism visa regime and supportive government policies.

Overall spending by Chinese tourists is likely to break last year’s record high of US$48 billion and climb to US$55 billion this year, says the CTA. Shopping is one of the major reasons for Chinese to travel overseas, said the report. A recent news release from the UK says Chinese visitors spent £200 million shopping in London West End alone with average amount per transaction being £600.  The department store Harrods in London recorded the highest single transaction of Chinese buyer of £140,000 with average spending per Chinese visitor of £3,500 in the store.

BCG projects that in the next nine years, China's combined domestic and international tourism revenues will increase 14% annually, creating a tourism market worth RMB 5.5 trillion (US$838 billion) a year, up from RMB 1.5 trillion last year.

Revenues from outbound Chinese tourism alone are expected to increase almost fourfold by 2020; China’s domestic travel market will be worth RMB 3.9 trillion (about US$590 billion) by 2020, says BCG.

BCG’s report concludes that hosts can do much more to welcome the expected flood of Chinese travellers, both at home and abroad.

Only a handful of companies understand or are responding to the specific needs of these travellers who tend to be younger than their counterparts in the West, less experienced, and more likely to take longer trips with large groups of friends, explains Hong Kong-based BCG partner Vincent Lui, a co-author of the report.

Affluent travellers among the survey's 4,250 respondents in 15 cities, said few hotels offered special services for Chinese, and premium-priced travel packages lacked differentiation and interest. Online travel planning, although growing in popularity, is unnecessarily complex, they said.