Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have teamed up with China’s leading mapping service Baidu Map in a bid to attract more Chinese tourists and to improve their travelling experience when visiting the Northern European region.

The tourism boards of the four Nordic countries and Baidu Map – the desktop and mobile map service owned by China’s biggest search engine Baidu – announced their cooperation in Beijing on Monday.

The deal will allow Chinese tourists to use the Chinese language mapping service – which has up to 500 million users in China – when searching attractions and querying routes during their trips to Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

“The cooperation aims to increase the destinations awareness, inspire the Chinese travellers and improve their travelling experiences,” Yile Gong, China PR Manager for Visit Sweden, told gbtimes.

For its part, Baidu Map will enable its mobile app to allow users to download offline maps in advance. The app will also offer some simple phrases in Chinese and the local language in case the user needs to ask locals for directions.

“We will support Baidu Map to provide the POI information in the four countries, and jointly develop more online promotion on both Baidu Map and Baidu Travel’s platforms,” Gong told.

The cooperation with Baidu Map is part of the Nordic countries’ joint promotion project in China under the theme "Beiou (Nordic Europe), more surprises per square metre".

Chinese tourism to the Nordic countries is growing fast at the moment. The number of Chinese visitors to hotels in Sweden increased 26.8 percent last year while neighbouring Finland saw the number of Chinese passengers to Helsinki Airport surge 50 percent.

Last month, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba took to Rovaniemi in northern Finland to announce the rebranding of its online travel platform from Alitrip to Fliggy.

 

 

Baidu going global

For Baidu Map, the cooperation with the Nordic countries is part of the company’s efforts to transform itself from a Chinese mapping service to a global one comparable to Google Maps.

"The cooperation signals a further step forward in the localisation of Baidu Map in the course of its internationalisation, following our cooperation with the tourist administrations of South Korea and Thailand," Li Dongmin, general manager of Baidu Map, told China Daily.

Baidu Map says it has a 70 percent share of the market in China, with 348 million mobile maps users at the end of September and about 100 million car owners using its mapping service.

But not content with dominating the domestic market, the company on Wednesday launched new map services in 150 countries and regions around the world, covering 99 percent of the world population.

Cooperating with overseas tourism boards should in part help Baidu Map to reach its goal of having overseas users account for half of its total users by 2020.

"We will strengthen in-depth cooperation with overseas governments and leading enterprises and choose some key countries to provide mapping services in local languages and increase our local impact," Li said.