Australians shade NZ's tourism efforts in China

By Dita De Boni

Experts believe New Zealand is not seeking enough tourists from the fast-developing Chinese market.

They say the Australians are not so backwards and are tapping into this underdeveloped Chinese market which is expected to yield them $A6.5 billion ($8 billion) over the next nine years.

Australia and New Zealand are the only two countries outside Asia able to accept Chinese leisure tourists, having gained Approved Destination Status last May.

This allows them to actively solicit visitors from China.

If New Zealand could net 1 per cent of the 6 million Chinese who travel beyond their homeland each year, it would land 60,000 visitors.

However, in the year to August 31, 18,751 mainland Chinese visited New Zealand. This was an increase of almost 12 per cent on the previous year's dip and ahead of 1997.

In its latest year Australia netted over 76,000 visitors from China.

And, while New Zealand is investing minimally in the Chinese market, Australia is spending $150 million on a Brand Australia campaign, aimed in part at Chinese tourists. Australia is also establishing a tourism office in Shanghai and Qantas is offering five services a week between Sydney and Shanghai with connections to Beijing.

In contrast, New Zealand planes do not fly direct to China and the Tourism Board spends $380,000 a year on "tactical promotions," according to its chief executive George Hickton.

"We are developing our China market in a progressive way - it needs to be carefully developed and planned," he says.

"It's not like there is a pent-up demand in China. The thing to do is build up market credibility.

"We can't just divert thousands of dollars from our other markets into an area where proper infrastructures are not in place and it's not, at this stage, a huge market."

He says Australia has been more advanced in China because they have had a head start - being first granted approved destination status at the end of 1997 - and because the Australian Tourist Commission has more money to spend on promotion, with a budget of $359 million over the next three years, which is largely concentrated on their largest source region, Asia.

Alastair Carthew, of Air New Zealand, says it is "premature to suggest a final outcome" to the issue of flying directly into China.

Air NZ looks to have a clear run from New Zealand because Ansett pulled out of China in 1998 and charter flights to New Zealand by China Southwestern airlines have stopped.

But it is sticking with interline arrangements with Air China, China Eastern and Dragon Air, which feed into the Air New Zealand hub in Hong Kong.

"We want to do it right by building a strong sales platform to ensure we get good quality business out of China," Mr Carthew says.

Pansy Wong, National MP and Tourism Board inaugural member, has worked on gaining approved status for New Zealand for almost 10 years.

She says the opportunity now presented will offer New Zealanders a "huge slice of the cake" and 60,000 Chinese visitors could easily help New Zealand lift tourism foreign exchange earnings from $4.4 billion to around $9 billion a year.

But she says to really capitalise on Chinese tourists, New Zealand has to pool its resources and launch a collective assault.

"To increase the awareness of our country in China, we need to build an overall image - to succeed we have to combine resources because there are 33 provinces in China, each one with more people than the whole of New Zealand."

Don Gunn, chairman of the Inbound Tourism Operators Council China group, says the Government, through the Tourism Board, does not allow enough budget to capitalise on the Chinese tourist market - a market he predicts will overtake the Japanese market in three-to-five years.

* Inbound tourist figures for August confirm a recovery in the Asian economies, with an increase in visitors from Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore and most notably Korea, which jumped 127.1 per cent from August 1998's figure to reach 3107.

* Japanese tourists continued to decrease at 12,402 - 1134 less than August 1998 and almost 3000 less than August 1997.

* Tourists from other regions increased 11.1 per cent over last August, with New Caledonia topping the list with a 152.8 per cent increase to 637.