A Shanghai couple is among a group of 11 tourists from the Chinese mainland, who set off Sunday for a grand world tour that will see them traverse a dozen countries and reach both poles in a whirlwind 66 days for a whopping 660,000 yuan ($104,216) - and part of the nation's rising affluent demographic with an interest in experiencing myriad cultures abroad.
With business-class flights to transport them to five-star hotels or high-end cruise ships, the Chinese tourists, who will kick-start their journey in Australia before moving on to cover ground in South America later this week, where their tours of a handful of countries will be topped off with a 10-day boat cruise along the Mediterranean Sea. The travelers will, of course, also flit through Europe, Asia and Africa on their trip - and squeeze in time for few and far between views of both the North Pole and the South Pole before returning to China on April 3.
It is the "trip of a lifetime" that Ctrip.com is running for the second consecutive year, as one of the largest travel service providers on the Chinese mainland plunges ahead in the expanding market feeding into the growing appetite of well-to-do Chinese travelers, who are eager to see the world more now than ever before, said Yu Lan, director of overseas travel for Ctrip.
"Chinese tourists have long been interested in traveling abroad, but now they want more enriched and varied experiences in different countries and continents instead of just settling on one or two places," she told the Global Times Sunday. "We designed this trip to meet the growing demand."
She said that 20 people are already on the waiting list for the company's world tour trip next year. Most of them wanted to make this year's world tour, but the 11-person group tour package sold out last year 13 seconds after it went online.
By the end of November last year, more than 1.09 million local residents traveled abroad with the help of Shanghai travel agencies, an increase of 14 percent from the same period in 2010, according to data from Shanghai Municipal Tourism Administration. Another 64,334 people further took advantage of the annual weeklong Spring Festival holiday that just passed to head for overseas destinations via the city's two main airports.
"Chinese tourists are less concerned about money these days, especially since the appreciation of the yuan," Yao Shuoye, a press officer for the administration, told the Global Times Sunday. "As China continues to open up to the world, it's getting easier for travelers to get visas, giving them more opportunities than previously to trot across the globe."
Still, Yao admitted that visa challenges remain an obstacle for Chinese travelers, an issue that Ctrip also acknowledged in putting together this year's world tour - the last of the visas for the group tourists came in only weeks ago, after the process was started last year in August, said Ctrip's Yu.
Still, the overseas travel market for Chinese tourists has payoffs that outweigh the visa hurdles involved, and one that other agencies, too, are responding to for their share. Among them, China International Travel Service has developed package tours to multiple destinations to appease the maturing clientele.
"While we do not plan annual world tours, we have done it before for clients," an outbound travel agent from the company's Shanghai branch, who asked only to be identified as Zang, told the Global Times Sunday. "We tailor a lot of packages based on what customers want, and that includes arranging trips with several countries tied into one tour.
"Most people today want to see more and do more," he added. "They want to get the most of their time overseas by traveling to more places to enrich their travel with a worldliness encounter they cannot get by staying at home."