Recreational vehicles taking roads by storm as China embraces wanderlust

Taking road trips in recreational vehicles has become a new trend in China and continues to gain in popularity, but the business is still nascent in the country compared with more developed markets.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic first struck some three years ago, more and more travelers prefer to drive themselves on trips, as it is more private, flexible and safer thanks to social distancing factors. In the first half of 2022, sales revenues of RV trips on Fliggy, the travel arm of Alibaba Group, nearly tripled the level recorded in the same period of 2019, when there was no pandemic.

As a newly emerging market sector, the supply of RVs in China has been relatively scattered and some standards are not unified. Some first-time drivers don't know enough about how to take care of RVs.

In November, Fliggy, the online travel platform that was the first to offer RV tours in China, cooperated with some business operators and introduced nine service standards to jointly promote the upgrading of the service level of the RV travel industry. Such requirements serve as the first industry service standards for the RV sector in China and include services such as penalty-free cancellations, emergency rescue and repair, and one-on-one guidance.

"Taking self-driving tours by RV can bring consumers different and wonderful experiences, and the sector shows booming growth prospects. Yet, at the initial stage of development, overall services available are not standardized and normative enough. We hope to help solve some real problems for the industry and consumers by introducing RV tour service standards," said Cui Yupeng, deputy general manager of the vacation department at Fliggy.

Wang Yankun, founder of Wolf Totem Travel Agency, which is based in Heilongjiang province in Northeast China and mainly offers long-haul domestic road trips, said although the RV travel market has grown rapidly in the past few years in China, the supply of RVs is still insufficient.

"Suppliers implement their own sets of service standards. The standards in terms of vehicle conditions and onboard services are different, and this may cause some problems for tourists and increase the service costs of business retailers. It is helpful to improve the overall service level by formulating unified service standards," Wang said.

Most RVs feature beds, a kitchen with a table, a refrigerator, a sink and a cooking stove along with a toilet, and they become more affordable options compared with staying at hotels. The total sales of RVs in China had increased from less than 5,000 in 2017 to some 12,600 in 2021, according to the China Passenger Car Association.

Compared with Europe and the United States, the RV market in China is still in its infancy. RVs have become an important part of residents' daily lives and leisure travel in the US, and sales of RVs in the country exceeded 600,000 in 2022, according to the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association in the US.

Domestically, Chengdu, Sichuan province; Urumqi, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region; and Kunming, Yunnan province, topped the list of destinations that travelers would like to visit by RV, according to a report released by online travel platform Tongcheng Travel and auto information provider Autohome Inc in November.

More than 90 percent of respondents said they prefer to take self-driving trips using their own vehicles, and SUVs were their top choice. Driving RVs is becoming more popular in China, and 7 percent of respondents said they would choose RVs when taking self-driving trips, according to the report that surveyed some 3,000 people nationwide.

Young travelers aged between 20 and 40 serve as the main groups who often take self-driving trips, and the number of people who would like to take self-driving trips alone continues to increase. In 2022, about 60 percent of surveyed travelers took one to three-day self-driving trips, the report said.