With the rapid development of China’s national economy, the leisure choices of Chinese people also have undergone great changes. The Chinese people’s leisure presents distinctive regional characteristics and cultural identity. As the increase in income and living standards improved, Chinese people are more willing to travel for consume choice. Chinese tourism is at s rapid developing stage, forming the three kinds of tourism: inbound tourism, domestic tourism and outbound tourism market. For its further development, China’s tourism should continue to focus much on domestic tourism market. Consumer demand for the spiritual life and growth making tourism become casual as a relaxed kind of entertainment. When people facing the highly technical and highly urbanized life, many people have the demand to enjoy nature and enjoy life, high quality tourism has become the pursuit of many modern urban people with consume consciousness. Due to that, the development of China’s domestic tourism would be even brighter. China’s domestic tourism promoted local economic development, and it is also influenced by national policy and regional economic development levels. Meanwhile, the hotel industry is also driven by the development of domestic tourism and has been considerable prosperity and development. It could be said that the development of tourism and hotel industry promote each other, are both important parts of Chinese national leisure. This essay will firstly discuss the variety markets and the growth of China’s domestic tourism. Following this, it will discuss the growth and diversified markets of China’s hotel industry. Finally, it will provide some suggestions for today’s Chinese leisure market.
The variety markets and the growth of China’s domestic tourism
With the economic development, China in the last century after 1990s, as guided by national policies, the domestic tourism market has entered a rapid development period (Wu, Zhu, and Xu, 2000). Since 1999, the total consumption growth rate remained at around 10%-12%, indicating that China’s domestic demand for tourism market has entered a stable stage of development. When the Chinese tourism industry in its infancy, the domestic tourism demand is not enough strong, showing small-scale, with single of the characteristics associated. Therefore, the first principle of China’s domestic tourism is to meet the inbound tourism demand as the main target. However, after nearly 20 years of development, domestic tourism gradually has become to be market-oriented, and Chinese people would like to take domestic travel as leisure-based behavior (Huang, & Xiao, 2000). The number of domestic tourists has grown, tourists levels also constantly improved, showing a large scale and covering wide demand characteristics. The formation of effective travel demand requires tourists must have a certain ability to pay, that should be available for discretionary income. With the opening up of China’s sustained rapid economic development, domestic residents’ disposable income is also increasing at the same time (Wu, Zhu, and Xu, 2000). The disposable income of urban residents rose from 1700. 6 RMB in 1991 to 7702. 8 RMB in 2002. With the sustained, steady, and moderate economy growth, income levels would continue to improve, people want not only meet their daily lives’ demand, which means that China would face increasingly strong domestic tourism demand and China’s domestic tourism market is still promising in the following years.
China’s domestic tourism meets the requirements and effective demands of different tourists who have the desires to travel and enjoy leisure time. When received the mobilization of Chinese government’s leave policies, China’s domestic tourism market made a rapid expansion (Wang, & Qu, 2004). Since May 1995 China launched the weekly rest-day work system and brought an excellent opportunity for the development of domestic tourism. These polices then leaded a weekend travel fever caused by the increase travel rate of urban residents in 1995-1999. September 1999, the Chinese State Council issued a national New Year and Day holiday approaches, made the Labour Day and National Day positioning as the Spring Festival holiday time with the extended 3 days, plus weekends before and after the formation of three complete the concentration of a week holiday as the Golden Week. It could be considered that, with the future improvement of the system for holidays, and paid holidays became more common, people are free to spend their time on domestic pinpoints. In these systems, the distribution of Chinese tourism is imbalance in some areas, and someone has become a cultural and fashion center, become a popular tourist site and entry, such as Hong Kong (Tam, Chan, Chu, et al., 2005).
The formation of effective demand travel requirements related to tourism infrastructure is needed to be improved. The rapid development of China’s national economy has been a strong guarantee for the domestic tourist attractions and supporting facilities construction. A tourist attraction is not enough only increase the attraction for tourists, and the domestic tourists travel demand also should to improve in order to achieve sustainable development of domestic tourism according to the local differences (Wang, & Qu, 2004). This requires that tourism-related transportation, catering, accommodation and other related supporting infrastructure, industry, construction and tourism development to become much convenient. Currently Chinese enterprises and the tourism management departments have recognized this, and they realized that the construction of tourism infrastructure is referred to a considerable height, increased investment, continuous improvement and tourism-related facilities. This will help to promote the formation of effective demand, tourism, promote tourism market. The formation of effective demand travel requirements of tourists reflects the change of consumer awareness. Economic development and upgrading of living standards, attract many international tourists, has changed people’s consumption concept, which making people more willing to improve their spiritual life through tourism.
The growth and diversified markets of China’s hotel industry
China’s domestic tourism development also greatly pushed the domestic hotel industry development and prosperity. China’s hotel industry is developing rapidly in 2004, accommodation and catering industry in China is total 1 trillion RMB of business, accounting for 7. 3% of gross national product, is about to become very important China’s national economy industry. With China’s sustained rapid growth and the rising living standards, it would gradually speed up the internationalization process of Chinese hotel industry. With the host of Beijing Olympics and Shanghai World Expo and Guangzhou Asian Games and even the further success of large-scale activities held in China by 2020, China would become the largest tourist destination in the world, and further promoted China’s hotel industry’s development to a new stage.
Currently Chinese hotel industry shows many characteristics. The most hotels continuously improve product functionality. After 20 years of development, China’s hotels could be subdivided as the general business hotel, tourist hotels, resort hotels, conference hotels, theme hotels and the general hotels, etc., and these hotels could continue to meet the diverse demands of the travel market (Pine, & Phillips, 2005). There are about more than 100 hotel groups, nearly 1, 000 hotel chains. Hotel consolidation and reorganization progresses, and the international hotel group from the low-end market promote the tourist market, accelerate the pace of internationalization of the domestic market. Hotel Services become more prominent in the hotel industry. Electronic information technology has been used into China hotel industry, and the global information highway also provides customers new services, such as artificial intelligence on the technology of temperature, light, automatic adjustment, the rooms have broadband Internet access, room is able to receive satellite TV network signal, remote network scheduled. So that the hotel industry increasingly dependent on science and technology. Hotels would become the main body of the hotel industry market. In the hotel industry, hotels have the largest space for future development. Chinese hotels begins to follow international hotel industry trends, being consistent with the actual Chinese hotel market segments to meet the needs of domestic tourists, and on major events is not sensitive to economic factors. Star hotel industry in China would shift to the main economic development of a new era hotels.
The level of the overall hotel market returns showed a strong momentum of development. Considering all five star hotels in China’s management fees and fixed fees, its income increased by 42% over the same period, four-star and three star hotels grew by 52% and 24%, compared to 1990s. International management of the five-star and four-star hotel than other hotels with the level of management to achieve better earnings before charges and fixed costs, total revenues were 43% and 35%. Shanghai’s five-star hotels achieved the highest level of return, has 48% of total revenue, followed by Sanya (47%) and Beijing (40%) of the five-star hotel (Lam, & Han, 2005). In addition, the five-star hotel, the rooms of the hotels are still the highest total revenue department. Hotel room revenue accounted for 55% of total revenue, while its total expenditure amounted to only 11%. In the main expenditure, catering is containing 35% of income in the total expenditure.
Some suggestions for today’s Chinese leisure industry
The Chinese government should further adjust and improve the statutory holidays and leave regulations, in order to promote the prosperity and development of China’s domestic tourism market. Tourism activities and national holidays and vacation is closely related to institutional arrangements, and the introduction of adjustment programs of national holidays and paid annual leave regulations, will have an important impact on space-time structure on domestic tourism flows and tourism development.
The implementation of the new holiday system will break the monopoly of the past space and time factors of travel, promote tourist flows. The promotion of coordinated development of regional tourism would optimize the layout of space tourism industry and narrow the differences in regional tourism. On the one hand, the adjustment of the statutory holiday will significantly increase the proportion of short-range tourist flows, increase tourism sources, and promote the development of tourism markets. It could force local government and tourism enterprises to pay more attentions to the development of local tourism market, and take serious on the active development of local tourism market, tourism product, tourism activities to enrich the content of local tourism. By optimizing product structure and promote local tourism development, the local economy development is of great significant convert. When local government adjust the implementation of tourism polices, it will bring about more potential tourism, especially to these state-owned hotel (Heunga, Zhang, & Jiang, 2008). Once met the personal needs of tourists, many tourist areas, which are not popular in the past, would be the choice of different types of potential tourists, thus stimulating the remote tourist spots to recovery, promoting the coordinated development of regional tourism. Those measures could improve the overall economic benefits of tourism. Of course, in nowadays, green, environmental protection, energy saving, safety, and health development of the international hotel has become a new direction of hotel industry. Followed the trend, many activities are implemented to create green hotels, promoting China’s hotel industry into the safety, health, environmental protection, and energy saving road in the future. At present, China mainly focus on hotel supplies: disposable daily necessities, intelligent products, hotel decorative items, sports goods, food supplies, cleaning supplies, uniforms, and several other aspects of the hotel. Among them, the hotel leadership management level also should be enhanced (Wong & Chan, 2010). Along with the development and improvement of living standards, customers increasing the demand for the hotel, which requested hotels in system equipment, used the hotel intelligent systems. Therefore, hotel equipment, intelligent systems, would be the development of hotel equipment, as an important trend. The other tech-intensive hotels supplies will be smaller, light and miniaturized to the trend of development.
Conclusion
In conclusion, China’s domestic tourism and hotel industry has been rapid development and prosperity, because of the rapid development of national economy and domestic policy, regulation leave’s promotion. Brought by the increase of Chinese residents’ income, it improved the quality of many people life, and more people want to choose consumption and leisure, the tourism and accommodation outside. To some degree, Chinese people’s leisure has markedly changed. Of course, China’s domestic tourism presented geographical imbalance, which asked tourism authorities to develop a positive awareness of domestic tourism consumption. For the western and rural areas, the consume awareness of many tourist areas is not strong. So that it could take various measures to encourage people to travel. In order to promote tourism and hotel industry’s further development, it also should be constantly improving and standardizing China’s leave system. Beside successful enterprises in the construction and restructuring of hotel, it has many efforts to create China’s own strong hotel group. When Chinese super-national hotel group become the famous hotel brand of the world, it could get the establishment of China in the international hotel industry on a due place.
