Beyond arrivals totals: Insights into Chinese outbound patterns to South Korea in H1 2018

Following the better-than-anticipated total of 80 million Chinese tourist arrivals seen around the world in H1 2018 – a year-on-year increase of 16.4% – COTRI raised its annual forecast for the whole of 2018 from an initial 154 million to 160 million Chinese border crossings. Should this total be achieved, it would represent a growth rate of 10.3% against 2017’s annual total of 145 million arrivals.

Within 2018’s robust double-digit growth rate is a wide range of trends and narratives that reveal different development rates in various destinations. A pillar among the total H1 2018 figure is the strong growth posted by top-two global Chinese outbound destinations; Hong Kong SAR (23.7 million arrivals, +13.4% YoY) and Macau SAR (11.7 million arrivals, +13.3% YoY), contributing a net addition of 4.2 million arrivals between them. With the inclusion of Taiwan, the three Greater China destinations still account for a large share of the total Chinese outbound tourism market (45.9%), meaning that trend shifts in these destinations can have a notable effect on global patterns.

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Image: N Seoul Tower, Namsan, Seoul, South Korea by dconvertini Source: Flickr Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)