Only 37 Chinese tourists visit Taiwan per day

Tainan, Taiwan
via Wikipedia The expectations were high when direct flights between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland resumed earlier this year, as especially Taiwan hoped for larger numbers of tourists from China, spending more money to stimulate its economy.
Claudia Jean (h/t Global Voices) did a nice job in finding out the reality behind those high expectations. At the time, the Taiwan government hoped for 3,000 tourists extra per day, spending close to USD 2,000 per head. The reality about the number of tourists:

Dr. Pan dug out some detailed figures from Taiwan’s Tourism Bureau and worked out that the number of Chinese tourists in July 2008 reported in the press (N=5,389) included those from Hong Kong and Macau. Without those, direct flights from China only brought in 1,002 Chinese tourists in July and the vast majority of passengers on those flights were Taiwanese people working or living in China. This leaves the daily average of Chinese tourists brought in by direct flights a stunning 37.

What those tourists are spending might not be a surprise for those who are familiar with Chinese tourists in for example Europe. Apart from high-end valuables as for example diamonds, Chinese tourist try to spend on average as little as possible. Taiwan shows the same pattern:

The current direct flights everyone seems so excited about certainly don’t increase the number of Chinese tourists and their actual average spending has been $195 per person per visit.We can also see in the statistics that the number of Taiwan’s biggest visitor group, Japan, has decreased since Ma vowed to bring in lots of Chinese tourists.

The story is not untypical. Foreign investors in China tend initially to focus on the 1.3 billion Chinese consumers as their customers, but tend to discover the hard way that their consumer base it a bit less than that. When you are able to successfully tap into the financial resources of the top-end spenders in China, you're much better off, but that would need a bit of a different strategy to attract that group of customers.

Commercial
Taiwan would be better be able to tap into the Chinese consumer market with the help of some of our top-speakers at the China Speakers Bureau, like Tom Doctoroff, Shaun Rein or Paul French. More advise on how to get to the Chinese consumer might actually be useful too. When you are interested, we can check their availability for your event.

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