Who Are Your Target Chinese Travelers When Doing Destination Marketing? - Profiles of Chinese Travelers

Who Are Your Target Chinese Travelers When Doing Destination Marketing?
-    Profiles of Chinese Travelers

With the popularity of new travel modes like independent travel and tailor-made travel preferred by Chinese tourists, new challenges have emerged for overseas destination marketing: How to capture the diverse consumption demands of Chinese tourists to raise their recognition of and interests in the destination? How to find the right target audience? And through what channels can the tourists be attracted to the destination?

Most overseas destinations’ marketing activities in China mainly focus on offline promotional events targeting at tour operators and travel agencies only. However, newly-customized tourism products can hardly be included in the elaborate brochures and marketing materials prepared by various tourism administrations. Furthermore, it’s hard to quantify how much the promotional events relate to the increase of Chinese tourists to the destination. On the other hand, with the rise of Chinese tourists’ income and the rapid escalation of their consumption level, the traditional package tour products which are stereotyped with a busy schedule have gradually fallen out of favor with Chinese tourists.

When planning destination marketing, two things must be taken into consideration: the positioning of destination brand and the strategy of distribution channels. When doing the positioning of destination brand, you must determine the target audience, the consumption level of the destination and the unique experience which can trigger the demand. Through research, we come out with the profiles of Chinese tourists from the perspective of consumer psychology. Here are 8 major groups:

1.    Experiencers
They are relatively insensitive to the travel expense. What matters most is whether they can get abundant, funny and authentic experience in the destination. They are mainly elites and corporate executives aged 25 to 45 years and households with a relatively high income.

2.    Adventure Travelers
They are independent longing for in-depth experience in a specific topic or field, which is usually closely related to outdoor or photography. The major difference between experiencers and adventure travelers is that the former focus more on a unique experience while the latter pursue professionalism.

3.    Cultural Travelers
They pay more attention to cultures during the trip, and are curious about religion, history, geography, folklores, and cultural heritages. They hope to explore their self-worth and the significance of life by traveling. They are usually well educated people between 35 to 60 years old with plenty life experience and are fond of reading and thinking.

4.    Business Travelers
They usually travel for meetings or business while they usually take advantage of their fragmented time to visit surrounding scenic spots after finishing their business schedule. For millennial consumers, the boundary between business trips and tourist trips are being blurred and thus this travel mode of “business + tourism” is becoming popular among young business travelers.

5.    Leisure Travelers
They are leisure-oriented with hotels they stay as their destinations, pursuing a good accommodation experience. They usually go for sightseeing and experience activities around their hotels. Most of them are professionals aged 25 to 50 years, who are busy with their daily work and take use of their annual leave to relax themselves. Besides, some family travelers traveling with children or parents also prefer a relatively relaxing travel mode.

6.    Luxury Travelers
They pursue privacy and high-end luxury experience in the trip and pay more attention to service. For them, travel is an extension of their lifestyles and a symbol of their status. With a wild age range, they are shareholders from large and medium-size enterprises, professional executives in finance and other high-end industries as well as children from affluent families, among whom the post-90s generation has become an important consumption group of luxury travel.

7.    Punch-in Travelers
They tend to travel to different destinations in a limited time, usually visiting each destination for only once. Many package tourists between 50 to 70 years old hope to visit more destinations when they are still in good health to fulfill their life with no regrets. Meanwhile, they network and communicate with their peers to form a relatively stable companion travel group.

8.    Discount Travelers
They are very sensitive to travel expenses and are more impetuous when there is a travel discount, for they are pursuing to spend less money to complete their trips. They are mainly young travelers between 20 and 30 years old that are restricted by their economic conditions like income, and some housewives and the middle-aged and elderly people who enjoy discounts and deals.

Now you’ve known the key groups of Chinese tourists. Who is your target audience then?