Golden Week: Is Hong Kong still the number one destination?

If you stayed in Hong Kong during the golden week, you may have noticed that it was quite easy to navigate your way through shopping areas and attractions. Hong Kong recorded a slight 5% increase year-on-year in traffic from Mainland China during the Golden week.

An article from China Daily reported that package tours from mainland coming to Hong Kong dropped by 13% whilst hotels had a decline in occupancy rates, and theme parks also expected a decrease of 10%-20% in the number of visitors during the Golden Week.

However, when we look at the outbound travel figures from China, there was a 36.6% increase from last year, so where did all these travelers go?

I was in Jeju (Korea) for the Golden Week and the tour guide told us that on October 1st there were 70,000 Chinese travelers entering Jeju, an island with only 600,000 people.  The major shopping areas were packed with Chinese tourists, and almost all the locals I met could speak fluent Mandarin, even the fruit stall owner on the street!

Other countries such as Japan and Thailand continue to be top destinations for Chinese tourists but this continues to pose huge challenges for the Hong Kong Retail & Tourism sectors.

From looking at the past few months’ numbers, we can see that Hong Kong is no longer the number one destination for many mainland tourists. The recruitment market has also been affected by this trend, as many retail and tourism companies have been more cautious in hiring new headcounts. We forecast that recruitment will remain a bit more quiet in this last quarter of 2015, compared to last year, and we are yet to see whether this will bounce back in 2016.

However, at Morgan McKinley we still have a number of great job opportunities so please view our Sales and Marketing jobs. Alternatively, if you are looking for career advice; especially in the Tourism and Travel industry, then please do contact myselfor one of our team members.