WEMBLEY is not London's most appealing suburb. The area around the stadium is untidy and architecturally uninspired-good for facilitating the movement of tens of thousands of football fans, but hardly a place to linger. The shops of the West End are a 25-minute tube journey away. To Chinese tour groups, though, hotels there like the Holiday Inn and the Ibis are honeypots.
In 2011 some 150,000 Chinese tourists made it to Britain, compared with 3.6m visitors from France. Their numbers are growing fast, though, rising by 35% from 2010 to 2011 and 20% year-on-year in the first 11 months of 2012, according to VisitBritain, the national tourist board. To lure more visitors, Theresa May, the home secretary, is moving to simplify the process of applying for visas-something that currently puts off many Chinese. With China's total outbound market likely to be three times as big as Japan's by 2020, according to the Boston Consulting Group, the British government is reluctant to miss out on a lot of potential shoppers.
To meet the needs of this growing group, some hotels are starting to ape department stores by catering specifically to Chinese tourists. Hilton's Huanying programme, which operates in six British hotels, gives guests kettles in their rooms, Chinese teas, slippers, at least one Chinese television channel, a Chinese breakfast and a full-time Chinese-speaker. At the Novotel London West, in Hammersmith, Chinese noodles are served at breakfast and a Chinese television channel is available.
Cheaper hotels have made fewer concessions. The number of Chinese guests they receive-and the price those guests wish to pay for rooms-is not yet big enough to warrant special treatment. Expect that to change. A few small measures can put a hotel ahead of its competitors. "Slippers are a basic thing," says Adam Wu of China Business Network, which facilitates contacts between companies in China and those abroad. Add kettles so that guests can boil the noodles they may have brought with them, congee (rice porridge) at breakfast and a Chinese-speaker on staff, and you have a reasonably Chinese-friendly operation.
Some hotels are also rethinking their design priorities. Nick Barton of the InterContinental Hotels Group, whose brands include Holiday Inn, says Chinese consumers are quick to judge a hotel by its welcome and its lobby. They will often photograph the latter for friends at home, according to Roy Graff of ChinaContact, a consultancy: "Travel is about showing off."
Chinese tourists still rate handbag shopping as more important than bedrooms. "The vast mass are happy with quite cheap hotels," says David Painter of Kuoni Group Travel Experts, a group-travel operator. He contrasts his company's Chinese clients, who will stay in two- or three-star hotels, with their older Japanese counterparts, who want three or four stars.
Yet the expectations of Chinese travellers are changing as they become wealthier and more experienced. Many Chinese going to Britain will have already travelled domestically. The comparison between the lodgings they find at home and those they see abroad may not reflect well on the latter. Mr Wu says he has had to rescue Chinese guests from British hotels that have left them bitterly disappointed. Sometimes even slippers are not enough.
Source: The Economist
