Officials from Canada's tourism bureau are making more efforts to attract Chinese visitors, who are becoming a bigger part of its tourism sector.
The measures include more tailor-made packages such as ski trips and family vacations for Chinese visitors. More platforms such as Fliggy, the online travel unit under Alibaba, will launch winter promotions to Canadian destinations during China's upcoming November 11 shopping festival.
British Columbia (BC) boasts beautiful scenery such as mountains, coasts and forests, and the region is offering more tourism products in different seasons, Maria Greene, director of global marketing partnerships from Destination British Columbia (BC), said at the Showcase Canada Asia 2017 in Beijing on Tuesday.
She said that 31,200 Chinese visited BC in 2016, up 18 percent from a year earlier, and growth will continue. She said that next year, which will be the Canada-China Year of Tourism, there will be more choices for travelers and the number of arrivals from China is expected to increase by 12 percent from this year.
Greene said average spending for each Chinese visitor in BC has increased from C$1,500 ($1,196) in 2015 to about C$2,000 this year.
The growth reflects supportive policies such as Canada offering 10-year visas since 2011, which allow visitors to visit Canada for as much as six months at a time, market watchers said.
More airlines have launched routes linking the two countries.
Last year, Air Canada launched service from Shanghai to Montreal, Hainan Airlines started a Beijing-Calgary route and Hong Kong Airlines opened a Hong Kong-Vancouver route. There are as many as 185 direct flights per week between the two countries.
Ben Cowan Dewar, chairperson of Destination Canada's Board of Directors, said in a note sent to the Global Times that Chinese travelers have grown fast in recent years and become the second-largest source of visitors for Canada.
According to Destination Canada, Chinese arrivals to Canada in the first seven months of this year reached 610,000, up 24 percent from a year earlier.
