According to the Chinese Government, outbound Chinese tourists reached 130.5m last year, 15m of which stayed close to home – visiting destinations in the Asia/Pacific region – and almost 60% of them were women.

 

Among Chinese female travellers, Hong Kong remained by far and away the biggest destination for mainland Chinese women last year.

 

Nearly 27m crossed over from the mainland in 2017 outnumbering the men on a 60/40 basis. However, in 2016 the percentage of female Chinese tourists to Hong Kong peaked at 63% whilst in South Korea last year the share of female Chinese visitors dropped from 64% in 2016 to 57.5%.

 

“There were obviously very special circumstances in South Korea last year that impacted female Chinese holiday travel in particular,” say traffic analysts at Air4casts.

 

“Package tours, for example, to Jeju island had been especially popular with groups of young Chinese women and these ground to a halt because of the Thaad dispute.”

SOUTH KOREA DROPS OFF RADAR FOR WOMEN

In the first quarter of 2018 there has been an improvement in Chinese visitor numbers to South Korea but at the same time there has been no let up in the female decline, insists Air4casts, with a Q1 female Chinese visitor count of just 56.4%.

 

“The last time South Korea recorded that ratio of female to male Chinese visitors was back in 2012,” it adds. “In Hong Kong there appear to be several reasons behind the year on year decline in the female share of visitors.

 

“For the dedicated female shopping tourist, Japan was hugely attractive last year. The underlying political tensions between the mainland and Hong Kong also had a slight impact and then there is the fact that a trip to Hong Kong is no longer regarded as anything special.”

 

Online platforms like CTrip make booking more trips very easy and booking them is what young, female Chinese travellers are doing in their droves, adds Air4casts.

 

EUROPE’S POPULARITY STILL GROWING

“The female to male Chinese visitor ratio in Europe has increased steadily over the past five years, but data from European governments is rarely collected on a strict headcount basis.

“There is a great reliance on face to face interviews to determine visitor profiles and whilst sample sizes are large, 300 thousand in the UK for example, the published results are aways subject to sampling errors.”

 

Taking all of the available studies from the major European countries into account, 56% of Chinese visitors to Europe were women last year, up from 53% in 2016. They are young; over 40% were in the 18 to 34 age bracket and they increasingly travel independently, making their bookings online with CTrip ‘the most used bookings vehicle’, particularly via its mobile channel; indeed in the under 25 age bracket the proportion of independent female travellers topped 80%.