Destinations Changing to Cater for Tourists from China

Conrad Sanya Haitang Bay,Hainan Island.

The design of hotels and resorts across Asia is changing to cater for the growing power of tourists from China.  Chinese tourists have specific preferences, and the hospitality industry is looking to satisfy these.

More than 70 million tourists from China went on holidays in 2011. This number is expected to increase to 100 million by 2020. There are an astonishing two billion domestic trips expected to be taken within China itself this year, according to the China Travel Trends website.

Among the destinations most favoured by China’s travellers are Hong Kong, Macau and Hainan Island.

The Park Hyatt Shanghai

To cater for the increase in demand, the world’s major hotel and resort chains are expanding throughout China — and throughout the region — at an incredible rate. China’s southern Hainan Island alone has around 30 five-star resorts and 70 luxury hotels opening along one of its beaches (Haitang) in the next five years.

And while major operators expand in terms of simple numbers, so too are they expanding in terms of just how they satisfy the needs of the tourists they hope to attract.

“The Chinese customer has a matured a lot and is now very focused on the experience they get,” Singapore-based American designer Alan Barr says. “There is a big movement towards contemporary design. In a certain sense it is getting more eclectic and shifting towards the contemporary but the designs certainly always tip their hat to China. We refer to it as classically contemporary.”

The Peninsula in Shanghai

Barr operates the design group Blink! — alongside fellow American Clint Nagata — and is currently involved in a collection of major resort and hotel developments across Asia, including the Jumeirah Dhevanafushi in the Maldives, Qbe@Gole in New Delhi, the Westin Resort & Residence in Ubud, Bali and the ultra-luxury Conrad Sanya at Haitang Bay, Hainan Island.

Barr believes designers have moved on from attempting to cater for the Chinese consumer by simply including what they believed to be traditional fittings — or copies thereof.

Urbn Hotel Shanghai

“A western view of what is ‘Chinese’ is now seen as patronising — the client is smart enough to know that is not a real Ming vase in the lobby, it is a copy, and it’s rude to do that,” says Barr. “So what designers are looking for now is what we call ‘modern Chinese’. The Park Hyatt in Shanghai is an example. It’s cleaned-lined and very contemporary but everything tips its hat towards the classics. And The Peninsula in Shanghai is a marvellous, contemporary version of an art deco piece. In China you can go wild with the architecture but the customer demands a comfortable, classic experience inside it which we try to contemporise.”

China’s “first green hotel — the Urbn Hotel in Shanghai — opened to much fanfare in 2008 and Barr believes environmental concerns have since played an increasingly influential role in the development of hotels and resorts throughout the country.

Haitang Bay Hotels

“The green movement has finally moved away from being a fad and a trend to where there is enough data now to show that it makes sense as an investment,” he says. “Everybody has green initiatives — the card that asks if you want your towels washed, etc — but those initiatives are to keep operating costs down. Now you can finally build green or build sustainable. It is going to have a much larger hold on the industry in the near future. It has been a fad until now but now there is a data. You can say that over 10 years, we can save you 30 percent on energy consumption and it will save ‘x’ amount of dollars and so owners and operators are responding to that.”