Posted on

China: 120 million international travelers and just getting started

In 2016, more than 120 million Chinese traveled internationally. which is roughly the entire population of Japan (or Canada, Italy and Australia combined).

And only 10% of the country has a passport.

Imagine the travel industry when 25% of Chinese residents are traveling abroad. Where will they go? What will they want to see? To help shed light on these questions, Hotels.com recently interviewed 3,000 Chinese residents who traveled internationally over the past year.

It published these findings in the 2017 edition of the Chinese International Travel Monitor report. If you want to better understand Chinese travelers, where they’re headed and why, this report is a must read.

Here are a few items that jumped out at me:

  • China is already the largest source of international travelers for many countries.
  • Yet only 10% of the Chinese population had passports in 2016.
  • Shopping is no longer the prime attraction for a growing number of travelers
  • Nor is group travel, which is quickly losing favor among older travelers. Translation: Chinese travelers are tiring of those buses.
  • Independent travel is very popular among millennials.
  • And eco/green tours are becoming quite popular, particularly among older travelers. I’m very happy to see this.
  • The most welcoming countries to Chinese travelers, based on survey respondents, are Thailand, Japan, Australia. The USA made the top 5, though I suspect that ranking might be slipping based on current events.
  • The top landmark in the US:  Grand Canyon.
  • The top landmark in Australia: Great Barrier Reef.
  • And in France: the Louvre.
  • Chinese visitors spend more in the US than visitors from any other nation, approximately $7,200.

So what does this mean for hotels and other travel segments? It means you have be curious, nimble, and you had better support Chinese — both on your website, in your call center, via social media, and with in-house Mandarin speakers.  Survey respondents ranked poor hotel localization as a top 5 problem.

Chinese is also not as well supported across many of the global travel websites I reviewed two months ago. As shown here, based on our new report Destination: Marketing, Chinese is found on only 64% of the leading tourism websites.

Also, accepting Visa or Mastercard is not good enough. Most Chinese travelers prefer to pay with UnionPay.

Click here to download the report.

And if you’d like to know which tourism and destination websites are the most world-ready, check out our new report Destination: Marketing.

Finally, if you want insights into localizing your website for China, check out Think Outside the Country.

Posted on

Nissan: The best global automotive website of 2017

For the 2017 Web Globalization Report Card, we studied the following 14 automotive websites:

  • Audi
  • BMW
  • Chevrolet
  • Ford
  • Honda
  • Hyundai
  • Land Rover
  • Lexus
  • Mercedes
  • Mini
  • Nissan
  • Tesla
  • Toyota
  • Volkswagen

Historically, automotive websites have been strong on languages but weak on global consistency and global navigation. And while most automotive websites continue to struggle on these fronts, I was pleased to see Nissan’s new global website design, a big reason why Nissan emerged number one for the first time.

BMW was the leader last year, with support for 41 languages and average global consistency. But Nissan’s new web design is more consistent and generally exhibits greater depth of localization. While many automakers do exhibit some degree of global consistency within a region, such as within Europe, it’s rare to see global consistency across regions. Shown below are Nissan’s Germany and Brazil home pages:

You’ll find few automotive websites that support consistency to this degree between these two distinct markets.

Nissan added a language last year and is now is tied with Honda for the lead in languages, at an impressive 46 languages. Nissan also stands apart in its support for local-language social feeds. For instance, here is an excerpt from the Spain home page:

 

When it comes to global navigation, sadly, no automotive website stands apart. Nissan, like many companies, incorrectly relies on flags. But it does do a very good job of supporting country codes.

What’s the best global website among American-based automotive companies? That would be Chevrolet. While many GB brands are, globally speaking, a mess, Chevrolet does exhibit a number of global best practices. It also does a good job of supporting Spanish for the US market:

Tesla was a new addition to the Report Card this year. And while the website does support strong global consistency, it lags in languages and in global navigation — also relying heavily on flags. Here’s the global gateway:

Hyundai finished last in our ranking this year, with low scores across the board, with the exception of global reach (languages). Note that Hyundai supports an impressive 43 languages, which goes to show that languages alone do not make for a successful global website.

Automotive companies are highly decentralized organizations with independent web teams and budgets, which often results in websites that share few design elements across country/region websites. But Nissan has taken a promising step forward, one that I believe other automakers are sure to follow.

For more information, check out the Web Globalization Report Card. It includes more than 25 pages of automotive website profiles.

Posted on

Announcing the top 10 global tourism websites

While I’ve closely studied travel websites for many years (such as airlines, hotels, travel agencies) as part of The Web Globalization Report Card, I’ve not spent much time looking closely at destination websites, such as for cities, regions and countries.  That is, until earlier this year.
For this report we benchmarked 55 country, region, and city tourism websites across six continents. Of those websites, here are the top 10 overall: 
Germany emerged on top driven in large part by its support for a leading 24 languages as well as global consistency and local content.
 
The leading city website is Paris, with support for 11 languages, which may not sound like many languages, but is actually well above the average for city websites.
Which leads me to the key finding of this report: the growing language gap between travel and tourism websites, which I will write about in a later post.
Western Australia came out on top of the regional websites. Shown here, note the globe icon in the header used to highlight the global gateway — a very nice touch.
Tourism websites should lead the travel industry
Language is just one of the areas in which tourism websites need improvement. This report carefully documents the many different types of navigation strategies used by tourism websites and provides best practices that all sites should consider. It also takes a close look at localized content, social media, and support for mobile users (also a weak point).
It’s my hope that this report helps tourism organizations make a stronger case for globalization. After all, the travel and tourism industry is growing at a faster pace than the global economy and by 2017 is projected  by the World Travel and Tourism Council to account for 1 of 9 jobs on this planet. Tourism websites play a key role in attracting travelers and more than half of these travelers do not speak English.
To learn more about the report, click here.