To encourage Australians to visit China, ten panda-themed campervans are travelling 30,000 kilometres around the country for the next two months.
Organised by China’s National Tourist Office, the Panda Explorer journey is indeed a new concept.
Luo Weijian, the director of the China National Tourist Office in Australia and New Zealand, said he hoped the event would encourage more Australians to visit China for a holiday. He continued saying that they are sending the panda vans to travel along the Australian coast, so they hope the exposure of the panda van will have more opportunities to let local people know about the tourist attractions of China.
More than 700,000 Australians visit China every year and the tour is part of the 2017 China-Australia Year of Tourism.
Mr Luo, said in his statement that the Panda Explorers would promote China to Australians, especially in regional areas such as Broome on the north-west coast, as the campervans travel around the country. He agreed that Chinese tour operators needed to do more to attract more Australian visitors and said his office planned to ramp up its marketing efforts.
China looks set to overtake New Zealand as Australia’s biggest tourism market, with more than 1.2 million Chinese visitors to our shores over the year to February. Tourism Australia’s chairman, Tony South finds this campaign promising and might prove fruitful to the local tourism industry as well.
Mr South said that as these vans do their 30,000 kilometres around Australia as is planned, those messages and the images and the adventures that the drivers and the others that are going with it experience will be broadcast loud [and] wide … in China.
Mr South said Tourism Australia was pressing on with its strategy to boost spending by Chinese tourists to $13 billion a year by 2020. China National Tourist Office director, Luo Weijian, agreed that Australia’s tourism industry needed to lift its game, but said he thought Tourism Australia was on the case.
