Opportunity for UK inbound operators to capitalise on China’s Golden Week

Travel and tourism businesses in the UK should leverage the forthcoming Golden Week, which is China’s 7-day-long National Day holiday (Oct 1-7) to attract inbound tourists from the ever growing inbound market from China. 

This was highlighted by Edward Teng, managing director of Digipanda Marketing, a London based marketing agency dedicated to marketing UK brands to attract Chinese customers.

Teng pointed out that China’s Golden Week holiday has become a major revenue opportunity for travel and tourism businesses as well as retailers around the world.

He specifically referred to a report revealing that almost 600 million Chinese people travelled during the Golden Week, while about 6 million of them went on overseas trips and spent about £5.5 billion.

The report also indicates that post 90s are the biggest age group (41%), followed by post 80s (31%). The UK entered the top 10 overseas destination for Chinese tourists in Golden Week 2016, due to depreciation of GBP after Brexit referendum.

However, Teng said, for most of the UK tourism and travel businesses, Chinese tourists would not automatically appear. He said:“They need to build up brand awareness and reputation in the China market. Without a minimum brand awareness, you just cannot imagine Chinese tourists would include your name in their itineraries.”

Talking about how Digipanda could help, he said the company has introduced online live shows for UK attractions and tour operators, in which the company will send one of their internet stars who is currently studying in UK to the attraction or tour operator and to do live video stream on one of the popular live video stream platforms in China, such as Huya.com, Douyu.com, Panda.TV, etc., which are extremely popular among post 90s in China.

In the meantime, the online live shows will be promoted on social media channels, including Weibo, QQ and WeChat. “Clients can even offer an e-voucher, which enables interested parties to download, and the effectiveness of the campaign can be assessed by the number of downloads and number of redeemed e-vouchers”, added Mr. Teng.

Wayne Maraj, non-executive director of Digipanda Marketing said: “Digipanda’s solution, allows UK companies to have a presence and drive awareness across China from £500 per month.”