Australian businesses set their sights on Chinese tourists
Andrea Plawutsky, the Sydney-based director of Amplify Me, helps tourism operators and destinations tailor products and services for Chinese travellers. She says it’s time to ditch some preconceptions about Chinese visitors.
“Until recently, particularly at the operator and destination level, we’ve seen the Chinese as a reincarnation of the Japanese market of the 1980s, with tour buses and set itineraries,” she says.
“We haven’t been keeping up with the fact that many of the young Chinese, in particular, are going very quickly to a mature style of travel. We don’t break these tourists down into segments – we tend to look at them and say, ‘You’re Chinese’. But there are those tourists who are adventurous, those who are traditional, those who are here for the shopping experience and so on.”
