How Designer Hotels Are Targeting Chinese Tourists

Luxury Travel News

The Skift New Luxury column is our weekly column focused on the business of selling luxury travel, the people and companies creating and selling experiences, emerging trends, and the changing consumer habits around the sector.

Chinese tourists maintained their top spot on the global spending list, splashing $258 billion on outbound travel in 2017. To put that in some perspective, it’s almost double what the United States, the second-placed country, spent.

And as China gets richer, the middle and upper classes will grow too with the cumulative effect being more people will have more money to spend on vacations.

Luxury hoteliers have cottoned on to this, and are now starting to think more about how they can appeal to a Chinese traveler. And one of the ways they are trying to do this is through the use of designer-branded hotels (think Bvlgari and Versace). It’s a pretty straightforward way of communicating to guests what kind of hotel they’ll be staying at, a sort of shorthand for luxury.

And as the Chinese market gets bigger, it’s a trend that is only going to continue.

For feedback or news tips, reach out via email at [email protected] or tweet me @paddywhyte.

— Patrick Whyte, Europe Editor

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