The global tourism industry is excited by the enormous growth of outbound travel from Asia, particularly China, and every destination hopes to cash in on this phenomenon.
China saw a total of 117 million outbound travellers in 2014, an impressive 19.16 per cent growth over 2013, according to figures released by the China National Tourism Administration, and this growth story is expected to continue despite the economic downturn in China.Looking to capitalise on the booming Asian tourist market, Reed Travel Exhibitions is planning to launch a new brand of events targeting the region – WTM Connect.To uncover more information about the exciting events, TTN caught up with Craig Moyes, portfolio director at Reed Travel Exhibitions.What sparked the creation of WTM Connect?As your readers would already know, Reed Travel has three portfolios of events namely – International Luxury Travel Market (ILTM), International Business Travel Market (IBTM), which is focused on Mice travel and our portfolio World Travel Market (WTM), which is dedicated solely to leisure travel.With all these portfolios having events in major regions across the globe, we realised that we did not have any leisure-travel related events targeting the Asian and Chinese markets, which we consider very important. So as a focused initiative into this region, we have decided to introduce WTM Connect – Asia and WTM Connect – China.What would be the key features of these events and how would they differ from WTM?Although there are many competitive events in Asia and China, we sensed that all the needs of the buyers and exhibitors were not being fulfilled. Following a survey of our clients, the feedback highlighted two main areas of concern – time-efficiency and cost-efficiency.With WTM Connect, we wanted to ensure those needs were met. We have designed WTM Connect in such a way that the time and effort spent by exhibitors at the event would be 100 per cent focused on business. This begins with the exhibition site, which Reed Travel will have complete control over, providing all-identical meeting pods complete with hi-speed internet connection.Secondly, all of our buyers would be pre-selected and the scrutiny process would be much more intensive than that of our sister event, WTM. We intend to keep WTM Connect as a purely hosted buyer’s event, so it is our responsibility to ensure that we bring in real buyers and not ‘potential’ buyers.
With China emerging as a huge market, how important is the event for global firms to join the events?With all of our past events in the region, we have seen immense participation from international firms looking to grab a piece of the pie. Although the growth of the Chinese traveller market decelerated a bit last year due to an economic downturn, it has only slowed and not dropped drastically. The Chinese outbound market is still very promising and is expected to grow significantly over the coming years.What sort of participation can we expect from the Middle East?I can’t imagine not having a few exhibitors from Dubai or Abu Dhabi, and maybe Oman as well. We’re looking at about 120 exhibitor spaces, so we will keep the numbers limited as our aim is to ensure ‘flavour’ of products offered without focusing too much on one particular region.
What are some of the interesting travel trends you anticipate next year or in the coming years?With the current turn of events, we can expect Iran to slowly grow in the travel sector. We know that Accor is busy with hotels in the region, so we anticipate inbound to and outbound travel from Iran to increase. We also see interest in the Chinese market growing steadily, as well as the rise of unconventional supply chains in terms of accommodation. In fact, there’s a lot to expect over the next year and I’m sure we will see it at our WTM Connect events.
By Nikita Philip