Opinion | China’s outbound tourism boom and AI are powerful drivers of travel technology and tailored trips
- Companies are digging deep into data related to the interests, habits and preferences of travellers to make future trips more personalised
In the span of a week during Lunar New Year festival earlier this year, around 400 million Chinese went on trips primarily to unite with family members, and about 7 million of them travelled abroad, a rise of almost 10 per cent over 2018.
The China Outbound Tourism Research Institute (COTRI), an independent Beijing-based research and tourism advocacy organisation, reports that the number of outbound trips made by Chinese tourists in 2018 reached 162 million, exceeding its forecast of 154 million, a rise of more than 10 per cent over 2017.
As such, China sends more tourists abroad than any other country in the world – 120 million mainland Chinese now have passports, with as many as 30 million more being issued in 2019.
Yet China’s outbound-travel market is a complicated web of shareholdings, as players rush to cater to globe-trotting Chinese tourists.
With oceans of readily available data and fewer privacy constraints than in the West, many in the industry are betting on technology and AI applications, such as machine learning, to turn a profit from the desire of Chinese people to experience something new abroad.
Much of that flurry of activity to date has been propelled by Ctrip, the world’s largest online travel agency, which from its sprawling campus in Changning district in western Shanghai controls half of China’s online travel market.