WA fails to woo Chinese visitors
WA risks missing out on an unprecedented economic chance if it fails to capitalise on the boom in outbound Chinese tourist numbers, an international expert on tourism says.
Wolfgang Arlt, a German consultant who advises governments around the world on the tourism market in China, said WA struggled to get recognition in the eyes of the Chinese because they did not distinguish it from the rest of Australia.
The comments prompted Colin Barnett to concede more should be done to attract Chinese tourists but declared that major capital works in Perth were part of the plan.
"Perth as a city was falling well behind other mid-sized cities around the world," the Premier said.
In a presentation in Perth last week, Dr Arlt said there were almost 100 million outbound Chinese tourists last year and this was expected to double by 2020.
He said Australia got about 850,000 Chinese tourists during the period but WA attracted just 35,000 of those.
Dr Arlt said WA needed to market the State as practically another country and drop the word "Australia" from the brand if it wanted to lift numbers. He said Chinese tourists needed to feel respected and a way of achieving it was by providing Chinese options on menus.
He said the State should leverage off its proximity to Bali, noting the Indonesian island was popular with the Chinese and they might want to incorporate WA into trips there.
"There are different kinds of Chinese tourists," Dr Arlt said.
"You have package tourists who go quickly from one place to another and you're not really likely to get them all the way to Perth. But you also have more and more individual travellers - people with travel experience and more money."
