How Western Australia can go about learning from the mistakes of others when it comes to Chinese outbound tourism

Last week, I invited all COTRI Weekly readers to participate in the symposium on Chinese tourism organised by the Tourism Research Cluster (TRC) of Curtin University together with the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre in Perth, Western Australia and – not to forget – courtesy of the traditional owners of the land, the Whadjuk people of the Noongar Nation. It seems the distance to travel was a bit long for you, and indeed it is 2,100 km to the nearest bigger city (Adelaide) and 14,000 km to the COTRI headquarters in Hamburg, Germany.

You missed an interesting discussion on how to handle the facts of being on the “wrong side” of the continent and not having a daily direct flight connection with China.

My opening message to the audience was that Western Australia (WA) is in the lucky position of being able to learn from many other destinations how to avoid mistakes when working with the Chinese source market, as until now practically no Chinese tourists are arriving in WA. Iceland, Israel, Morocco and Poland, to name just a few, have double or more arrivals from China compared to WA, some of them without direct flights. The tiny Czech Republic, thirty times smaller than WA, has ten times more Chinese visitors. There were of course about 60,000 Chinese arrivals to WA in 2017, but most of them came as students, business travellers or to visit friends and families[…]

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Image: Kalbarri, Western Australia by Kyle Taylor Source: Flickr Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)