VFR's (Visiting Friends and/or Relations)  Tourism Potential for Pacific Asia

Top Five Destinations for Thai Outbound Travel, January - June 1998
Top Five Destinations (excluding China) for Hong Kong Resident Departures, January - June 1998
Growth Rates Drive Online Bookings, 1998 - 2000

A new OECD report shows that the three countries around the world with the largest groups of Asian immigrants are Australia, Canada and the U.S. The WS. has the greatest number of Asians - over 3.5 mil-lion overall - as well as housing the largest single group - 913,000 Filipinos.
That helps make Filipinos the largest group spread over the three countries, with a total of approximately 1.2 million people. The second largest, perhaps sur-prisingly, are the Chinese accounting for a total of approximately 872,000. Vietnam comes third with some 833,000.

The U.S. has four groups of resident Asians, each comprising more than 500,000 people-U.S. citizens originally from the Philippines, Korea-ROK, Vietnam and China. Expressed in terms of potential tourist arrivals and foreign exchange earnings, the figures are very impressive. E

Markets

Thai outbound travel declined by nearly 26 percent from January to July 1998 over the same seven month period the previous year. Intra-Asian travel suffered the least, although there were a few exceptions to the general trend. Travel to Indonesia, for example, was down by more than 63.0 percent and to Hong Kong SAR and China by 51.4 percent and 47.4 percent respectively.
 
 

All but one of the top favourite destinations of Hong Kong outbound travellers registered healthy growth from the market in the first half of 1998. The exception was the Philippines, down 4.9 percent. South and Southeast Asia overall attracted 16.4 per-cent growth and North Asia (Japan and Korea-ROK) grew by 54.8 percent. Travel to long-haul destinations, meanwhile, increased by only a modest percentage Europe and the Middle East were up 1.7 percent and the Americas 0.3 percent.
 
 

Pleasure travel from Japan by females was on track last year to do something literally unthinkable - ie overtake the male share. That was before the down-turn. What is happening now? The pattern may be continuing. In the first half of 1998 there was a 9.6 percent decline in travel by males, but only an 8.4 percent fall by females, resulting in a female share of pleasure travel departures of 47.5 percent compared with 52.5 percent for males. This suggests the "unthinkable" may still happen before 2000.

The results of a survey of Canadian leisure travellers by Yesawich, Pepperdine and Brown indicate that interest in adventure travel is down four percent over 1997's level. Demand for skiing has also fallen four percent and for scuba and snorkeling holidays three percent. Even golf is down three percent. The winner is family cruise holidays, up 38 percent.

Still on the subject of cruising, a meagre 3.6 percent of U.S. citizens had ever taken a cruise in 1986. This has now increased to 11.3 percent, according to the 1998 Market Profile Study sponsored by the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA). Some 75 million Americans say they are very keen to take a cruise within the next five years. Of these, 27 percent are under 40 years old, 45 percent are aged 40-59 and 28 percent are 60 or over.

Studies & Reports

Far from continuing to increase throughout the world, the amount of leisure time available for many people is likely to decline in the future. This is one of the worrying conclusions of a World Tourism Organization Business Council (WTOBC) study conducted by tourism and leisure consultants Horwath UK. The effect of this squeeze on leisure time will be to accelerate the trend to shorter, more frequent holidays, and could favour the expansion of easily accessible holiday destinations in the same region or time zone.

The results of a recent survey by American Express in Europe among 200 corporate travellers from medium-sized companies indicate that 27 percent of companies purchase at least some travel globally today, 73 percent think travel and entertainment will increasingly he pur-chased globally, and 60 percent are already seeking global deals with airlines and 61 percent with hotels.

An overwhelming 96 percent of those interviewed said they believe that electronic or c-commerce is faster, 93 percent said it produces significant cost savings and 67 percent said they either already use e-commerce or will be doing so soon. The majority of corporate travellers are clearly in favour of the euro. It simplifies payment, eliminates the inconvenience of foreign exchange and allows for improved expense reporting. Some 70 percent of corporate travellers interviewed by American Express also believe that airlines and car rental companies will be forced to reduce prices because of the increased transparency resulting from the launch of the euro.

The results of a survey by JRA Data & Forecasts among 12,000 female business and leisure travellers across four continents provides some interesting reading, as well as indications as to the untapped sales potential of this increasingly important sector of the travelling market. The survey looked at a number of different issues, addressing the special needs of female travellers of different ages, travelling alone or accompanied, and the product aspirations they had for pur-chases on trips.

Around 65 percent of females - 57 percent of those travelling on business and 72 percent leisure travellers believe that airport congestion severely affects the time they have for shopping at airports. Young women feel they are not well catered for, and that "much work is needed to provide retail outlets at airports which reflect their substantial spending power." Too many airport shops are aimed at the middle-age traveller.

The favourite purchases by women at airports are clothing items, followed by jewellery and fashion goods, and finally electrical and household goods. There is reportedly virtually no difference between the tastes of business and leisure travelling females in this regard.

Hotels

Radisson's goal is to receive 100 percent of its book-ings electronically. It still has some ways to go before reaching its target as the current status of bookings for the U.S. hotel group is 63 percent electronic bookings-62 percent from global distribution systems (GDS) and one percent via the internet-and 37 per-cent by phone. However, over 190,000 travel agents have enrolled in its "Look To Book" electronic system.

The U.S. - based Forrester Research has upped its forecasts for online bookings in 2000. In January 1998 it was projecting US$5 billion for travel bookings over-all, of which US$1 billion was attributed to hotels. Eight months later, in September, it forecast US$14 billion in online bookings for leisure travel only by 2000 - with US$5 billion of that for hotels.

Growth over the next two years is expected to be dri-ven not only by an increase in absolute numbers of internet users, but also by a higher percentage of peo-ple buying online.

In the past 12 months, Carlson and Accor have bought into, or bought out, their Pacific Asia fran-chisees-to ensure they arc not bought by rival companies. This is just one example of the shuffling in the region that has begun to take place - the free-and-easy attitude to expansion in Asia will take second place to caution.
 
 

As reported last month, All Nippon Airways has sold its San Francisco and Washington hotels and has removed them from its ANA Hotels portfolio-leaving it with only one property outside Pacific Asia, in Vienna. It has also reportedly closed most its overseas sales offices, adding weight to the rumours that its hotels subsidiary is for sale.

Japan Airlines (JAL) also looks likely to give up its hotel interests. Its hotel and resort activities - primarily its Nikko Hotels subsidiary-contributed to an increase in net losses for the group in fiscal 1997/98 (ended March 1998). JAL's plan is to sell its hotels-although keeping its hotel management company-to concentrate its resources on pure airline business. However, the value of some hotels has fallen since it acquired them, forcing the airline to set aside money to cover losses it expects to incur when the hotels are sold.

Travel Intelligence

These and other hotel industry developments arc covered in the new research report being published this month by Travel & Tourism Intelligence (TTI), entitled The International Hotel Industry-Corporate Strategies and Global opportunities. The report retails at US$760 but a special discount of more than 15 percent has been negotiated for PATA members.

This special discount also applies to other TTI reports being published in early 1999, the first of which will be EMU, the Euro and the Travel Industry. The report, available for US$295 (after discount) provides a detailed analysis of the implications of European monetary union and the single currency for the travel and tourism industry-not just in the euro-zone, but also in countries around the world which do business with, or whose customers travel to, this economic region.