Affluent Chinese prefer outbound travel again and Chinese pre-fabs conquer the world of hospitality

Dear reader,

During the pandemic, affluent Chinese had no choice than travelling in the periods when it was possible to cross provincial borders within their country, as the national borders remained shut for almost three years. This provided a positive impetus for the domestic tourism industry to offer new and diversified tourism products also for the upper end of the market beyond just going to Hainan or the big cities.

The latest reports from the October Golden Week however indicate that with international travel safe again and some countries offering easier visa procedures than before the pandemic, the rich are moving outbound again. What they are looking for is in a nutshell a 100% VIP service without any gaps and exclusive activities, not reachable for others. The younger ones rather go for adventure without risk and glamping, the older ones want to sample exquisite culture and food and health services. The rich "young old" aged between 55 and 65 years of age especially want confirmation that they are global citizens with international experience and to mingle with rich people from other countries.

This being China, all rich people are still looking on the side for business and investment opportunities even during leisure trips and some are searching for a future home. 

Besides tourists, China also exports prefabricated housing, aptly named “Green and Healthy Housing”, in the form of hotels, hospitals, student dormitories and social housing. Such buildings are finished as far as possible in factories in China and shipped in container form to the final destination. Such buildings are less wasteful and energy-consuming during construction, cheaper and faster to build and also more ecological during their usage. Hotels, including Five star resorts are increasingly build around the world, not looking at all like boring boxes or Eastern European style “Plattenbauten”, as they could be found in the 1980s from East Berlin to Ulaan Baatar.

Your humble editor was invited to visit one of these factories, which not only includes a big and very well designed Museum of Windows and Doors (probably the only one in the world), but also production sites which cover an area probably similar to Luxembourg or Andorra.

Fortunately, the concept includes also the transfer of knowledge how to design, manage the project and assemble the buildings in the form of academic courses based on Tsinghua University curricula, so that future developers and architects from Nigeria to Japan can work by themselves with the raw material coming from China. This should avoid any allegations to be made that China is damaging the local building industry or taking away local jobs.

Your humble editor is convinced that such buildings can provide a substantial lowering of the global ecological footprint of the world’s hospitality and tourism industry, with the discussion about the sustainability of tourism and hospitality often forgetting the impact of the production of hardware like streets, aircrafts, cruise ships and buildings.

Back in my new home Nepal, the first cooler autumn days are coming and the work to prepare the NICE Nepal India China Expo event at the end of February 2025 is continuing. Todays news that China and India have ended a four-year long conflict about their border regions should help to make NICE even more relevant than before. Maybe India will soon even allow the necessary usage of Indian airspace for international flights using the Chinese-build and -financed airport in Pokhara, two years after its completion.

Very likely I will be back in China in December and again in January, taking advantage of the short distance between Kathmandu und Chinese cities and the visa-fee entry for German citizens.

As always, all best wishes from Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Georg Arlt and the whole COTRI INTELLIGENCE team!