Zhe Lijuan has grown fat on Chinese dumplings–so much so that she recently opted to spend a bit of the proceeds from her successful Shanghai restaurant on a short overseas holiday. Her destination: the former British colony Hong Kong, where she took in the port city’s glittering sights and purchased a $300 platinum bracelet. One highlight of her first foray out of the mainland was the 3-D Gold Tourism Exhibition Hall and its main attraction: a $7.7 million toilet. Members of her group paid $3 each for a turn to have their pictures taken atop the golden throne. “This place is very deluxe!” Zhe gushed.
Zhe and her cohorts represent the new face of tourism, both in Asia and around the globe. In Europe and America, overseas holidays have long been a middle-class habit, but travel is only now becoming a mass-market enterprise in Asia. To be sure, the Japanese have been at it for a generation already, followed in the 1990s by footloose Taiwanese, South Koreans and Chinese from Hong Kong and Singapore. Still, their numbers pale when compared with the hordes of new travelers now flooding out from the region’s two emerging giants: China and India. “China alone is rewriting the rulebook,” says John Koldowski, managing director of the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) in Bangkok. “Japan took three decades to reach 17 million outbound trips annually; China did it in just five years.”
Asia is scrambling to accommodate these newbie travelers. With smaller budgets, shorter time frames and a penchant for group tours, they’re thoroughly unlike the more worldly visitors they’re rapidly supplanting. In Hong Kong, for example, a surge in tourists from the mainland has necessitated a shift in hotel construction from five-star luxury accommodations to three-star tourist hotels; hundreds of electronics shops that once lured Japanese big spenders with high-end gadgets are stocking up on cheaper fare–digital cameras and the like. Singapore has offered multiple-entry visas to attract Indians on holiday; regionwide, the change bodes well for efforts to allow Chinese and Indian visitors visas to enter individually as well as on group tours. The trend should fuel the rise of budget airlines in the region.
The tourism industry has reacted to the twin phenomena of travel booms in China and India by fundamentally re-examining itself. The old dichotomy between domestic and international travel has blurred in favor of a new concept called “total tourism.” It lumps all travel into one global category in which borders increasingly don’t matter. Today’s domestic tourist, goes the logic, will become tomorrow’s globe-trotter, who will return with more worldly tastes and create pressure to transform and modernize the travel industry back home.
India exemplifies the cycle’s origin in the rise of domestic tourism. Middle-class families, many traveling for the first time, have clogged the dewy mountain trails of Ooty, flocked to religious centers like Rishikesh and beset scores of beaches, nature reserves and palaces across the Subcontinent. Some 300 million Indians took trips within the country in 2003, spending nearly $9.2 billion according to the latest official tally, compared with $6.2 billion in 2002. Ravi Bhoothalingam, a tourism expert at the Confederation of Indian Industry, attributes their wanderlust to a combination of robust economic growth, surging stock prices and economic reforms that have lowered airfare costs and spurred road construction. Prodipto Bagchi, a typical wayfarer, discovered the joys of travel once his children were married and he had–thanks to handsome returns on a modest stock portfolio–the requisite disposable income. A native of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), he recently led his family on a vacation to Delhi, where they took in sites like the Red Fort and the Qutub Minar, a 12th-century sandstone tower. “I’ve already seen Mumbai and Goa,” he says, camera in hand.
Indians like Bagchi are also going abroad in record numbers. In fact, last year so many of them did so–roughly 4.5 million–that India lost millions in foreign currency because inbound tourism didn’t keep pace. That makes it difficult for the government to improve some of the country’s most popular tourist destinations; Agra, a city famed for the Taj Mahal, is a model of ad hoc development, pollution and filth with pockmarked roadways and huge garbage dumps. And Dharamsala, home to exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama, lacks an ATM machine in the upper city. “There is no proper bus stand,” says Rajinder Prasad, a local hotelier. “Often tourists who come and find no place to park go back disappointed.”
China, which launched its economic reforms a decade ahead of India, has already seen the rise of a huge middle class. In 2003, according to PATA, Chinese travelers took almost 800 million domestic trips–roughly the same number of total trips taken by the remaining four fifths of humanity. Likewise, China’s outbound travel has exploded. Last year mainlanders took more than 14 million trips to Hong Kong and Macao, and about 800,000 went to the top truly foreign destination: Thailand.
Across East Asia, governments are putting out red carpets for them. In South Korea, for example, a 10-year effort to attract visitors from China raised the tally of arrivals from 212,000 in 1999 to 550,000 in 2003, second only to those from Japan. Seoul markets three main attractions: the beaches of Jeju Island, bargain shopping in the capital and “pop culture” tourism–bus tours of scenes depicted in Korea’s popular television dramas.
It’s only a matter of time before Asia’s newest travelers fan out across the globe. Indians are showing up in New Zealand in three times the numbers of just five years ago; over the same period, Chinese travel to Australia has more than doubled. Even high-cost Japan attracted almost 20,000 Chinese tourists last year–enough for locals to realize that they’re not like other visitors. “Most don’t care about historic cities like Kyoto and Nara, because they think their history is much longer than Japan’s,” says Izumi Sunahara, director of ATC Japan Tours. “They also don’t care about the Ginza [district of Tokyo], where shopping can be very expensive.” Instead, they opt for wandering the electronics shops in Akihabara, and for cost-free outings to one of Toyota’s Tokyo showrooms. Another favorite: a ride on the bullet train–an experience that no doubt inspires dreams of journeys not yet taken.
