Rio Olympics brings opportunity to China's travel services

Tourism driven by Rio Olympics limited

Chen Guanming rides his pedicab on July 31 outside Maracana Stadium, the official venue of the opening ceremony of Rio 2016 Olympic Games.This special Chinese tourist, as affectionately called "Olympic Madman", arrived in Rio on July 30 with his half-vehicle-half-tent pedicab. Chen has been on a world tour on his pedicab for 15 years since 2001 after Beijing's successful bid. According to Chen, he plans to stay in Rio for about 20 days and then ride to Oceania after the closing ceremony. [Photo/Xinhua]

According to the Brazilian tourist administration, the 2016 Rio Olympics will attract at least 380,000 tourists and the tourism revenue will increase more than 60 percent compared with that of the 2014 World Cup.

But domestic market to Brazil is not that satisfying as most Chinese tourism enterprises said they have not developed specialized travel products for Rio Olympics. Only a few have introduced travel routes based on the games.

As the Chinese Olympic ticketing agent and reception service provider partner for Rio Olympics, Caissa Touristic has launched comprehensive online Rio Olympic travel products since the beginning of this year. Most of the buyers are corporate customers as many companies want to carry out their brand activities through the Olympic Games, while the individual travelers are about 3,000. The data shows that the number of people visiting Brazil in August will increase by 10 times compared with that of last year.

Specifically, Caissa focuses on package products such as "game tickets plus hotels" or "game tickets plus flights" for corporate clients, while for individual tourists, the main products are "game-watching plus Brazil traveling" and "Brazil and Argentina traveling", a Caissa official said.

Online travel agency Tuniu has launched 20 Olympic travel products which combine traveling with hot sporting events. For instance, tourists who book the program "Olympic Games opening ceremony: Brazil - Argentina 15 days tour" can get the opening ceremony ticket for free, or "Men's basketball final: Brazil - Argentina 15 days tour", the final ticket.

The launch of the theme tourism "Olympic opening ceremony plus in-depth tour of South America" on Lvmama.com has been sold out.

"Olympic tours mainly focus on the in-depth travel in Brazil and Argentina which usually takes 10 days, with the average fees between 60,000 to 70,000 yuan. So the long travel time and high costs affect the enthusiasm of many Chinese tourists to a certain extent," a staff member of Lvmama said.

A staff member of Ctrip said that they focused on selling travel products containing the strong points of Chinese delegations and the opening and closing ceremonies. But although the page views and click-through rates are high, there are not many actual bookings. It is probably because the price of flight tickets and hotels is rising and scarce game tickets which have made the travel products much less affordable.

According to Zheng Pei, manager in charge of Uzai's South America route, the current difficulties of traveling to Brazil are, firstly, to get a Brazil visa needs a long time especially during the Olympics, which takes three to four weeks, so tourists need to prepare at least two months in advance. Secondly, the South America travel routes promoted by travel agencies usually include four countries, so travelers need to provide visa materials for four countries at the same time. Thirdly, it takes almost 30 hours to fly to the South as there are no direct flights. Lastly, the unstable social circumstances and inconvenient traffics have greatly discouraged the tourists.

Businessman Xu Suimin from Nanjing cancelled his flights to Brazil concerning the chaotic environment there, as he heard that our track and field athlete Shi Dongpeng was robbed as soon as he arrived at the hotel. Even though he spent more than 26,000 yuan on the air tickets which were unrefundable.

But to be sure, Rio Olympics is a good opportunity to drive Chinese tourists to travel to South America. "We are more concerned with how the Olympic Games have raised Brazil or even South America's wider profile. We expect the boom of ‘post-Olympics' tourism," said Caissa 's vice-president Zhang Rui.