In its recent postings of country market profiles, the U.S. National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) tells us that, even absent a COVID-19 global pandemic, the once-overheated Chinese Market was about to/certain to, stay cold for another year. NTTO’s most recent long term forecast for key international markets forecast projected a total of 2,871 visits from China to the United States. Statistically, this is about the same as what it was for 2019 (2,830 visits).
Beyond the impact of the global pandemic on travel between the U.S. and China, analysts and observers were already advising clients in the U.S. that other obstacles stood in the way of a growth, such as the number of rejections of applications to travel to the United States and the on-again off-again “trade war” between China and the U.S.
In the Meantime: If one can get beyond the type of mental bloc that the obstacles above present, a cursory review of some of the key data in the China Market Profile reveals such points as these:
—The share of the overall number of Chinese visiting New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco declined from 77.7 percent of the overall total in 2015 to 60.9 percent last year.
—About two out of every five Chinese travelers to the USA like to visit U.S. National Parks.
—For nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of Chinese travelers, the purpose of their trip is to take a vacation or holiday, or to visit friends and relatives.
Some other highlights of NTTO’s China Market Profile are in the tables below.
Notes on NTTO material: Only country and world region destinations having a sample size consistently of 100 or more are displayed. Visitation incidence was rounded to two decimal places in NTTO source files beginning in 2014 to reduce artificial ‘jumpiness’ in the data caused by rounding to only one decimal places, especially for destinations having incidence of less than two percentage points. Due to quarterly data weighting by country and port of entry, some unreported destinations may have a higher proportion of total than those reported.
For additional information, visit https://travel.trade.gov/
