Tourism targets growth sector

WESTERN Australia’s tourism industry has struggled recently as the high Australian dollar proves a barrier to inbound visitors and encourages locals to travel overseas. However one market segment is bucking the trend – China.

Last March, 52,200 Chinese visitors arrived in Australia, a record month figure 31 per cent up on March 2011. The China Tourism Academy estimated that Chinese tourists made 70 million overseas trips in 2011 and spent $US69 billion.

With the sheer size of its population and increasing affluence, China is an enormous market for tourism; and WA is increasing its connections with the Asian powerhouse, with China Southern Airlines flying between Perth and Beijing via Guangzhou three times a week as of November last year.

In an effort to prepare WA tourism operators to best service the Chinese market, Tourism Council of WA has been running cultural awareness workshops, while Tourism WA has run trade missions to China and written its draft ‘China strategy’ to identify opportunities for the state to grow its share of the market.

That strategy involves: developing stakeholder relations between the WA and Chinese governments; a focus on consumer marketing; gearing up the WA tourism sector; engaging with tourism trade partners to funnel tourism into WA; and aligning activities of tourism operators with existing products and operators already in the Chinese market.

The Tourism Council has held 13 industry workshops since September last year across Perth, Margaret River and Kalgoorlie, and has a further five workshops planned for later this year. 

“We were trying to get some of the main attractions and operators ready, to have done some sort of training before the first flights from China Southern Airlines arrived. It was a concerted campaign to get some skills there before we got the increase in visitors from China Southern Airlines,” Tourism Council chief executive Evan Hall said.

The workshops included information about what Chinese tourists would expect from accommodation, what food offerings needed to be developed to cater to the market, how to best manage tour groups, how to tailor retail offerings, and how to address language barriers.

“Ideally we need to gear up to the point where we have Mandarin-speaking tour guides,” Mr Hall said.

Business is the main reason for Chinese visitors to come to WA, with 35 per cent citing business as the reason for coming to the state in 2011. ‘Business’ was the reason for less than 15 per cent of overall visits to Australia.

Mr Hall said leisure tourism was a growing space on which WA could capitalise, with close to 50 per cent of Chinese travellers having visited Australia for leisure purposes in 2011, but only 25 per cent having visited WA for that reason. 

“Crown is a crucial component for this,” he said, referring to the announcement last week that Crown Limited planned to invest $568 million in a new 500-room 6-star hotel at the Burswood Entertainment Complex site, which is to be renamed Crown Perth next month.

“We cannot be in that market unless we have world-class gaming facilities. It is not the only reason why they will come, but if you don’t have it you can guarantee they won’t be coming.”

Crown confirmed it had its sights set on China when announcing the development late last month. 

“Crown Limited is committed to making Crown Perth a world-class entertainment precinct to compete not only in the region, with the mega resorts in Singapore and Macau, but also globally, where large integrated resorts are increasingly being developed in an endeavour to capture a share of the expanding tourism market, particularly out of China,” it said in a release.

Mr Hall said no-one would invest $500 million in a hotel at the Burswood peninsula unless they thought it would bring business from the Chinese market. 

“Without a doubt, Chinese tourism is underpinning that decision,” he said.