Rio Olympics brings opportunity to China's travel services

Sports event tourism remains to be further exploited

Global sports tourism market forecast (source: World Tourism Organization)

According to the data from World Tourism Organization, the revenue of the sports tourism reached $205.2 billion, and maintained an annual growth rate of 15 percent, more than 4 to 5 percent of the growth rate of the whole tourism industry.

A report from China Securities released in March shows that the market value of China's sports tourism is 170 billion yuan, accounting for only 5 per cent of the total size of the tourism industry, far less than that of the developed countries. And of the sports tourism, more are concentrated in leisure tours rather than event tours.

"Event tourism is a niche market, it is not economical for big travel agencies to organize a package tour as far as the input-output ratio is concerned," an insider of the tourism industry said.

Narrow ticket booking channels and the fixed time of the games which makes it more difficult for travel agencies to buy air tickets and book hotels are two big obstacles for sports event tourism.

Big online travel agencies such as Ctrip and Uzai did not launch self-support travel products for the Rio Olympic Games.

According to Ctrip, firstly, there are not many direct flights to South America, which adds difficulty for the company to book tickets. Secondly, different from sports events like soccer and tennis, Olympic Games include many games so you simply cannot please everyone. Finally, there is usually only one authorized ticketing agent, so other companies cannot guarantee that they will get the tickets.

Chen Xiaobing of Caissa also said that people who are interested in sports tourism are not typical OTA users, that they have a higher consumption ability. So the launch of sports related tourist products on OTA might not have a very good result.

"We may choose some traditional ways such as asking our partners for distribution rather than selling the products ourselves," Chen said.

Nevertheless, sports event tourism is heating up. According to the data from sports.cn, the total number of spectators and participants who attended the sports events from January to April this year reaches 3.38 million, with transportation, accommodation, catering and other related consumption fees amounting to 1.19 billion yuan.

Staff member of Ali Travel said that current Chinese sports market covers 300 million people. Sports event tourism combines game-watching, star-fans economic effects, community activities, personal experience and sports culture pilgrimage so it has a bright future.

From the beginning of this year, Ctrip has put on the sports channel with hundreds of theme travel products such as NBA regular season, Euro Cup, Premier League, global marathon, F1 race, UFC and Golf Open.

"Sports event tourism is still a relatively new field, and the initial products simply combine games-watching with sightseeing. But there are already a number of products tailed for sports fans such as to watch the players training and visit the locker room. To develop sports tourism requires more in-depth cooperation between travel agencies, sports companies and even sports clubs," a staff member of Ctrip said.