Fiji reaches out to Chinese Tourists

Transcript

Tourism Fiji is going out of its way to woo visitors from the greater China region with a month long road trip through nine of the region's largest cities.

Tourism Fiji's global public relations manager Patricia Mallam told Koroi Hawkins the campaign is focusing on the high end Chinese travel market.

PATRICIA MALLAM: Because Chinese or the potential Chinese traveller has no idea at all as to you know, where Fiji is what Fiji is about, this outreach is pretty much a phase one where we are just educating them on you know, where Fiji is and what it has to offer to them. So it is more an informational to begin with where they begin to understand that Fiji is not on a large continent it is an actual group of islands in the middle of the Pacific surrounded by large bodies of water and then the diverse tourist activities that are available to them such as the ocean related one as well as the more terrestrial adventure type of activities.

KOROI HAWKINS: Which cities in China are you targeting and why?

PM: Okay so in the greater China region we have targeted nine cities that includes Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Ningbo, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Primarily because these are the more urbanised centres where we have identified that affluent travellers would come from these areas. Because they are a little bit more educated than those in the rural Chinese areas. They are more exposed to global trends and they are the ones with the inclination to travel outside of Asia to the Pacific.

KH: So this will be for around a month and after that what is the next step?

PM: After that we will continue with our digital branding campaign.

KH: You are showing potential for another record year in terms of visitor arrivals for Fiji this year. How long can you keep this up? Is this going keep getting better and better? Is that the aim?

PM: Well to be quite honest we are seeing really good improvements in the number of visitor arrivals month upon month. However Fiji's priority as much as it is to bring in additional travellers what we are trying to do here is to bring in you know quality travellers who have the intention of spending more. So they are more high yielding. For a country such as Fiji that has a carrying capacity that isn't to great we cannot continue to attract millions and millions of people. But what we can do is accommodate for quality travellers and give them a quality experience. With regards to the Chinese travellers it is ideal for us to work with them because our traditional markets are Australia, New Zealand and the peak season for them to travel is between June through to September, October. However for the Chinese travellers they would travel in off peak season where the slumps are and that is perfect because they fill in those troughs for us.