Brett Butcher believes Chinese tourists escaping to the sun will revolutionize the leisure industry in Asia.  The 50-year-old Australian managing director of Langham Hotels International said ever wealthier people from the colder north of China will increasingly want to take their holidays in warmer climates.
He believes this will prove a boon to hotels on Hainan, the tropical island off China’s southern coast, and to various other destinations in Southeast Asia.
“It is the next big growth story in China which has yet to happen. People are going to start to ask themselves …

Just how how hard can it be, asks Sina blogger and freelance journalist Chen Zikun in his August 6 post, for Chinese travelers to get a visa—with Chen’s answer apparently being: not too hard—in which he shares the stories behind visas for the many countries he’s been to:
Until I went to apply for a visa for my first ever trip out of the country, I was always happily under the impression that, being from a country with a rapidly-developing economy, and especially with how smug red-to-the-root media …

More and more stores and cash machines in Japan are featuring signs that read “Union Pay.” That is the name of a debit card used in China and informs Chinese tourists that they can shop anywhere in Japan using that piece of plastic. The number of stores accepting Union Pay cards in Japan rose from just 250 in 2005 to almost 20,000 this year. Chinese tourists are big spenders and Japanese travel agencies have hired Chinese students to help them guide the travelers to shopping districts, while department stores in …

Dear Tour Operator/Travel Agent,
A new EU Visa Code took effect on 5th April 2010 with the aim of harmonising and simplifying Schengen visa applications. To monitor its implementation, European Tour Operators Association is conducting a survey; they would also like to hear your experiences of visa processing for the UK and Ireland. which are not affected by this new code.
If you work with any of the origin markets affected, please complete this survey by clicking  http://www.consumerdatasurveys.com/etoa/

European Tour Operators Association would be very grateful if you could forward it to any …

MANDARIN translations on our street signs could lead to thousands more Chinese holiday-makers finding their way to the sun, sand and surf of the Gold Coast.
Gold Coast City councillor Peter Young flagged the concept that Mandarin versions of key places could sit alongside the English names as a way to welcome more high-end tourists and investment into the city from China.
It would not be the first time the Gold Coast has signalled its status as a multi-lingual location — shops and directional signs commonly bore Japanese throughout the city in …

One day this January, I was standing at the entrance of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and was happy to find there was an audio guide in Chinese  available. It was an exciting sign that the increasing number of Chinese tourists had caught the attention of the curators, and that their needs were starting to be seriously taken into consideration.
With so many Chinese tourists eagerly flooding into the outside world, China can’t remain a mysterious country in the Far East.
A recent report in the Financial Times says Chinese tourists’ “overnight” …

Something rather unusual is happening in China. Hundreds of porn sites, as well as a Twitter client and a video-sharing site, have all been released for public viewing and no one knows why.
China is virtually in the middle of a one-year scraping of the Internet, forcefully removing any content that censors find “vulgar” so decent people can surf the net without stumbling across images of bottoms.
So it was quite a surprise when not only scores of Western porn sites were opened once more …

The battle is not over. Google Inc.’s closure of its Chinese Web-search site, Google.cn, and relocation of the portal to Hong Kong last month is only a skirmish in the fight between the Internet giant and the government in Beijing.
Some see the move as the first real challenge to Beijing’s mercantilism and a harbinger of a shift in thinking in the business community about the Chinese market. Some see Google’s action as a bold statement on behalf of freedom; for others, it is an …

Reporters Without Borders released its annual report [PDF] on online access today. They call it Enemies of the Internet, and it shows a world where online censorship, intimidation and worse is increasing.
It’s not surprising that as access to the Internet expands, more and more dictators and tyrants will try to suppress it. But what’s troubling about this year’s report is the inclusion of two democratic countries: Australia and South Korea.

Both countries were included in the report’s Under Surveillance list – a sub group of the main Enemies list.
Australia’s proposed online …

Business social media can unlock the door to the world’s second-largest economy
A surge in Chinese exports for January has kicked the world’s fastest-growing economy back into life, at least in the eyes of Westerners. But China is still a difficult place to do business. Is there an opportunity for business social networks to break down trade barriers?
China is celebrating its 4,708th year. It is the year of the tiger and the country is safe in the knowledge that its economy is back on track. The trade figures make promising reading. …

A great article to further understand the growth of China – by Michael Elliott, International Editor for CNN
(Fortune Magazine) — What economic crisis? After a blip last winter, China is growing at more than 8% a year, and the scale and speed at which the country is building a modern infrastructure are mind-boggling.
But once you’ve absorbed the metrics — the size of its trade surplus, the thousands of miles of high-speed railways, the new ports and highways — a nagging question comes into focus: Sure, China can grow, but can …

Here is a great article from SinoTech founder Matt McDougall.
There has been a lot written about the online travel sector in China but there is not many putting out a view for the future for Chinese online travel ecommerce. In this article, I will take out my crystal ball and make some predictions about what the possibilities hold for the future of the online travel market. This is simply my view of the travel ecommerce space and although history may prove me wrong; that’s just the risk of being …

TripAdvisor’s acquisition of Kuxun, China’s No.2 travel search engine, kicked off its ambitious investment plan of US$50 million in China’s burgeoning tourism market over the next two years.
Kuxun will join many other Expedia-owned online travel companies in challenging China’s number one online travel company, Ctrip, whose market share is five times bigger than that of its nearest rival.
These include eLong (China’s number two online travel agency, acquired by Expedia in 2004), Daodao (the recently launched Chinese travel-review website, owned by TripAdvisor), and Egencia China (the travel management unit).
Kuxun means “cool …

BEIJING – Twenty years after the toppling of the Berlin Wall, another “wall” is facing intense public scrutiny in China.
The so-called Great Firewall of China, the online filtering and surveillance program run by the communist government’s Ministry of Public Security, is alive and well and censoring freedom of expression for millions of Chinese.
But over the past few months, Chinese discontent with the Great Firewall has bubbled over with increasing frequency and fervor.
Chinese netizen’s ire was recently sparked by the Green Dam censoring software that was proposed last summer and the …

Source: China Solved (Aug-Nov 2009)
Chinas Fractured Web, Part 1 – Opportunities and Challenge
With the effective blocking of You Tube, Facebook and Twitter, Beijing is succeeding in splitting the Chinese internet away from the global system. A few years ago China’s “Great Firewall” was considered anachronistic and laughably outdated. But instead of crumbling into cyberdust, the digital version of the Great Wall of China has become broader, higher – and more comprehensive.
What are the implications of a fractured internet that excludes not only individual sites but entire communication platforms? It is …

It happened to Coca-Cola on Sept. 14, to Rio Tinto a month before. Even the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. has been hit. The Chinese government has now investigated employees at all three of those companies in high-profile corruption cases. At Coke, a bottling plant employee was accused of taking $1.5 million in bribes. When your company is charged with corruption in China, you have to worry about not only bad publicity but also running afoul of America’s Foreign Corruption Practices Act and a Chinese government that is increasingly clamping down on …

The 5th International Conference on Destination Management with the theme of “Weathering The Storm of Global Recession: The Challenge for Destination Management” held in Hangzhou, China and just concluded on 22 September 2009 with so many take away points.
The First Day Report can also be viewed at http://www.chinatraveltrends.com/2009/09/21/5th-international-conference-on-destination-management-day-1-quick-report/
Second Day and the last session (Session 3) was about “Creating Opportunities” with the early morning session being moderated by Mr. Jurgen Bachmann, Secretary-General of CETO.
First Presentation was about “Innovation in Product Development”.
Mr. Hans Dominicus, Director of Marketing and Development of Amsterdam Tourism …

The 5th International Conference on Destination Management with the theme of “Weathering The Storm of Global Recession: The Challenge for Destination Management” took off in Hangzhou China and held from 21-22 September 2009.
Organized by World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) with the cooperation of People’s Municipal Government of Hangzhou and Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA), the conference objective is to highlight the need for effective tourism destination management.
Mr. Du Jiang, Vice Chairman of China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) mentioned that even though the number of China …

One of my foreign friends want to improve his Chinese. actually, he can speak smooth and frequent PuTongHua now. but his reading and writing skills are not that good. I think most of Chinese can recognize he is not a native Chinese speaker from his writing materials. and he cant understand exactly what the Chinese’ real meaning is sometimes. So he let me be his Chinese teacher. Then I became his teacher, this happened 2 years ago. It is different now, I believe his spoken Chinese will impressed every Chinese. …

Since I started posting about censorship I’ve noticed with some surprise that the basics of the system are not clearly understood by many readers outside China. This post is to classify and explain the system in the most simple way possible. It is largely drawn from my own experience as a user in China and from the studies by Rebecca Mackinnon.
The internet censorship in China is a complex system in constant evolution, both technologically and in terms of the content censored. It is managed by the State Council Information Office …