Trip.com Expects Chinese Outbound Travel to Gain Momentum in 2nd Quarter

A shift towards experiential journeys, growing demand for premium travel options – Indians approach to travel is evolving, according to Mukul Sukhani, senior vice president of business development at Mastercard.

Six casino companies have agreed to invest a total of $15 billion in Macau over ten years, with more than 90 percent of the money pledged to non-gaming activities.

Marketers beware: Prior ways of marketing to Chinese consumers, including travelers, won’t work as well today because their preferences changed during the pandemic.

China’s latest loosening of its stringent zero-Covid policy, mostly for domestic tourism, comes across as too little too late, at a time when the rest of the world is living with the virus. 

Even though China’s recent relaxation of Covid measures is widely seen as a step forward for travel, Trip.com is still cautious in the very near term as winter is usually a slack season for both business and leisure travel.

Chinese travelers cite financial constraints over the last three years as the leading reason for not wanting to travel abroad even as China decided to end its zero-Covid policy by easing travel restrictions, according to a report.

Online travel agency Trip.com Group hopes that cross-border travel capacity for China will be back to normal by the third quarter of this year.

American comedian and actor Kevin Hart is a man on a mission as he is looking to hire an ambassador for Abu Dhabi’s Yas Island. Hart, who was appointed Yas Island’s first-ever chief island officer in May, announced the job opening on social media on Monday, calling it the “world’s best job.” The salary being offered for the two-month role is $100,000. Anyone aged 21 years or above can apply for the job, the last date for receiving entries is January 23. “No CV, previous experience or cover letter needed, just your video up to 60 seconds (videos over 60 seconds will be disqualified),” the website mentioned. Once hired, the ambassador will take part in a variety of tourism activities for Yas Island while being put up at the W Abu Dhabi for 60 days. Yas Island has also made all the video applications public in its website.

India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country later this year, as China begins to decline and India’s population growth shows no sign of slowing until 2064. That shift carries huge implications for travel across the globe, and has the potential to rewire the race for attracting global tourists around the world. Skift addressed this in its Megatrends 2023 package in the story India Becoming the New China in the Reordering of Asia Travel.

India is expected to overtake Germany to become the world’s third most powerful travel and tourism market by 2032, according to World Travel and Tourism Council’s Economic Impact Research.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Wednesday, March 15. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

For more than two decades, outbound travel from China was a major rising catalyst for global travel, an economic engine spurred by the emerging middle class in the country of 1.4 billion people. Chinese travel could be felt from Vancouver to Dubai to Singapore with destinations becoming reliant on the steady stream of easily spending tourists.