Report of the 2017 International Tourist Destination (Cities) Promotion and Marketing Training Program III

Ms. Jennifer X. Ma, Co-founder of Grand China MICE, brings the participants a themed speech on MICE tourism.

On the morning of April 19th, the training program proceeded to the third day, when Ms. Jennifer X. Ma, Co-founder of Grand China MICE, delivered a themed speech on MICE tourism to the participants of the training program. MICE was created after M&E (meeting & exhibition), but explains the “meeting and exhibition” more accurately. “Meeting & exhibition” literally refers to meetings and exhibitions. However, since other activities are also linked with the process of holding meetings and exhibitions, the range has now expanded to include incentive tourism and festivities. In China, MICE tourism has entered a new phase of development, and Ms. Ma carefully explained customer types, travel types, travel budgets, trends, developments, and other aspects of MICE tourism. In her explanation, she also gave her own suggestions and advice to the students for them to launch their MICE tourism market marketing campaign. For example, when contacting their Chinese counterparts, they need to take notice of the updates of information, learn the latest trends, learn the trends of China’s media changes and so on. In the end, she analyzed the cases of Singapore and Sydney. As the most popular destination of China's MICE tourism, Singapore and Sydney have rich meeting and festival holding experience and enough venues. The counterparts in these places have received systematic and professional training and accumulated rich planning experience.

At the end of the class, many participants expressed that if they hadn’t attended this training class, they would have never known that there is such a large MICE tourism market in China. These real and specific pieces of information can be used as practical guidance for these participants to learn about China’s MICE tourism market and develop their own future strategies.

Mr. Zou Tongqian, Deputy Director of WTCF Expert Committee, brings the participants the last speech of this training program.

On the morning of April 19th, Mr. Zou Tongqian, Deputy Director of WTCF Expert Committee, delivered the last speech of the training program to the participants: The General Situation of Chinese Outbound Tourists’ Consumption. During yesterday’s training class, Mr. Zou systematically explained the current condition and trend of development of China’s outbound tourism market. Based on this analysis, he spent more time and energy in analyzing Chinese outbound tourists’ main characteristics, hobbies, main source, favored cities etc. in this class. As the main force of outbound tourism, Chinese tourists largely differ from foreign tourists because of different cultures and historical traditions. Also because of geographic differences, tourists from northern China and southern China are quite different from each other. Learning the habits and hobbies of Chinese tourists is helpful for foreign cities to develop exclusive city marketing strategies for these tourists.

The Training Class

After the two and a half day training program ended on the afternoon of April 19th, the participants set off for the Badaling Great Wall. Guided by their Head Teacher Wang Jian, they climbed to the top of China’s most famous landmark: Badaling Great Wall. The practical knowledge gained from visiting a famous tourism attraction combined with in-class theory will allow the students to fully grasp the unique characteristics of China’s tourism market. At the same time, the on-the-spot investigation also helped everyone relax after the intense and serious training program. This also allowed participants to learn about China’s tourism market from different perspectives.