Trendy travel bug bites young Chinese

Young Chinese tourists are adopting trendy travel options for visits abroad this summer, including watching pop concerts, participating in music festivals and visiting landmark attractions nearby.

Several Chinese students who completed the National College Entrance Examination in June plan to travel abroad with friends this summer to watch concerts and take tours of surrounding attractions.

Tourism companies have launched targeted products to satisfy this growing demand.

Trip.com Group, China's largest online travel agency, recently collaborated with South Korean television station SBS for the first time to launch travel packages that combine the admission tickets of concerts and scenic spots, as well as hotels.

Besides offering an official channel for ticket purchases, the packages also provide options for travelers to take cars to and from concert venues. These were sold out overnight immediately after the first group of products was launched in June.

"It has been often difficult to obtain tickets for top-tier overseas events and performances. The information gap caused by language barriers and the speed of the internet has also provided opportunities for some criminals targeting the overseas performance and tourism market, and many fans have fallen for fake tickets earlier," said Zhou Huijie, an analyst of the research institute of Trip.com.

"The concert package launched by Trip.com offers a friendly price for students, satisfying their desire to enjoy traveling while watching overseas performances," Zhou said.

The main consumer groups who bought the packages were born in the 1990s and after the year 2000, which together accounted for 77 percent of the total, and they are mainly from Shanghai, Beijing, as well as Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Sichuan and Fujian provinces.

On social media platforms in China, there have been a large number of posts about the experiences of booking concert tours overseas. Several have inquired online about the official ticket purchasing options for concerts, while others have sought out people who can join them in watching these overseas shows.

The popularity of the upcoming star-studded SBS Gayo Daejeon Summer in July has skyrocketed among K-pop fans in South Korea and China. Fans have expressed concerns about whether they can get admission tickets to the concert.

Most official websites in South Korea don't provide Chinese language versions, so it has been difficult for Chinese fans to buy tickets with a good view of the show.

Previously, Trip.com had achieved positive results in distributing overseas performance tickets as an agent. Popular South Korean singer IU held a concert in Hong Kong in May, and all the available concert tickets on Trip.com were sold out within 30 seconds of launch.

Besides, booking volumes for travel products to Hong Kong surged by sixfold after the availability of the concert tickets, indicating the strong driving force of concerts on the local tourism market, Trip.com said.

Summer is the peak travel season for Chinese consumers. So far, the booking volumes for outbound tourism products have surged 150 percent over last summer, according to Qunar, a Beijing-based online travel agency.

Some countries, including Malaysia, Singapore, the United Arab of Emirates and Qatar, which have issued visa-free entry policies to Chinese travelers, are expected to see the popularity of their tourism markets exceed levels recorded in the pre-pandemic period of 2019, according to Qunar.

In addition, the average prices of international flights have declined by 22 percent year-on-year with the increase in international flights. The supply of international hotel accommodation has also resumed to the level seen in 2019, and the average prices of international hotel rooms have fallen from rates seen in 2023, Qunar said.