Russia draws in China's tourists with visa-free regime and "red tourism" package
Chinese tourists are flocking to Russia, drawn by its new "red tourism" package, highlighting Russia's communist past, coupled with its visa-free regime.  Nearly 200,000 Chinese tourists have visited Russia already in 1H2015, making them the largest number of tourists visiting the country.  Russia noticed that it was factors such as St Petersburg's turbulent revolutionary past that the Chinese tourists admired, rather than its winding canals and beautiful buildings that Europeans tend to visit.  Therefore, in July, Moscow and Beijing officially launched its "red circuit" tourist route, tracing the life of Vladimir Lenin in four Russian cities, which has proved to be very popular already with the Chinese.
Budget Center highlights failings of tourism policy

By Tseng Wei-chen / Staff reporter





A recent report published by the legislature’s Budget Center urged the government to cut the annual quota for Chinese tourists and instead try to attract more tourists of other nationalities who have higher spending power.

“The government needs to establish a tourism policy that aims to do more than merely increase the volume of tourists to Taiwan year after year. It also needs to intensify tourism campaigns to draw travelers with a lot of spending power,” the report said.

The report, titled “Issues on the Management of Chinese Tourists in Taiwan,” showed that China has been the nation’s No. 1 source of overseas visitors since 2010. More than 2.26 million Chinese visited Taiwan last year, accounting for 41 percent of all foreign tourists.

The report said that the majority of overseas tourists used to come from Japan, but cited Tourism Bureau statistics showing that the number of Japanese traveling to Taiwan fell in 2008 and 2009. The number of Japanese tourists dropped from 738,000 in 2007 to 663,000 in 2009 before rebounding in 2011, it added.

The center also cited bureau data published in 2012 showing that Japanese tourists spent an average of US$386.68 a day while in Taiwan, an amount much higher than the average for all international tourists — US$285.33 — and far exceeding the US$267.32 spent by the average Chinese visitor, the report said.

According to the report, Japanese tourists buy more local products than Chinese, preferring to purchase Taiwanese snacks, whereas Chinese tourists like to buy jewelry or jade.

Additionally, the center’s report identified some problems generated by low-budget tour groups of Chinese visitors.

“Gift shops are turned into ‘museums’ on these tours and what is supposed to be a guided experience in which the group members can build a special trip for themselves instead feeds them into a tourism factory,” the report said. “Free independent tourists from China are coralled into groups and forced to go on shopping tours.”

Even though the bureau has barred local travel agents from serving Chinese free independent travelers and reinforced inspections of hotels, restaurants, gift shops and tour buses to enforce these regulations, the report said the effect of these measures was limited because travel agents were not being fully cooperative.

Failure to address these issues will make Chinese tourists less likely to return and visit Taiwan again, the report concluded.