New York seeks intrepid tourists

The head of NYC & Company wants tourists to get off the beaten path

While Chinese tourists are known for coming in tour groups to New York to see such destinations as the Empire State Building, Wall Street, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Macy's, Fred Dixon wants Chinese tourists to have a more immersive "real New York experience".

He would love for them to stay at a New York hotel, exercise in Central Park and take a nighttime stroll on the city's streets.

That may be more likely as the individual traveler becomes more common, said Dixon, president and CEO of NYC & Company, the city's official tourism marketing arm.

NYC & Company wants to convince Chinese travelers to stay in New York hotels and visit boroughs outside of Manhattan, perhaps learning the subway system and acclimating to the bustle of city life.

Right now, Chinese tourists headed to New York - NYC & Company projects that number to break 900,000 in 2016 - mostly visit in group tours that go on large sweeps of the Northeast, stopping in Washington, New York, Boston and Niagara Falls in upstate New York in two to three weeks.

Such forays make their stays in New York touch-and-go, said Dixon, which makes sense given that the Chinese are acting as most tourists do when they first start traveling abroad.

"[The way the Chinese are traveling now is] the way Americans traveled to Europe in the '60s and the '70s. There's the joke in American travel that, 'If it's Tuesday, it must be Belgium,'" he said.

"You don't know where you are, you've seen so much - 14 capitals in 14 days. That's the way Americans used to go into Europe," he told China Daily at NYC & Company headquarters in Midtown Manhattan.

"And it's just a whirlwind tour, and that's what you do when a market first emerges. The travelers are probably coming outbound for the first time; they've been saving, they've been dreaming about this their whole lives, and they don't know if this is the only shot they get. So they're going, 'I want to see everything I can in one shot, and if I get another chance to go back, then I'll go and dive deeper,' " he said.

Because the itineraries of the Chinese tour groups are so aggressive, in order to stay moderately priced, groups often stay outside of New York, in New Jersey or elsewhere, to keep their travel costs economical.

Dixon said that approach leads to an incomplete New York experience. NYC & Company sees the chance to educate travelers on how to have a deeper New York experience, he said.

That includes marketing the numerous Chinatowns across the city, the rise of Brooklyn and Queens as must-see destinations, and of course working with New York City's retailers to promote shopping.

The company opened its first China office in 2007 in Shanghai, and although it does not disclose how much of its $37 million budget goes toward China, Dixon said that it invests more in China than it does in any other market.

The investments have paid off in many ways - visitation from China was 229,000 in 2010, and has quadrupled in six years. The 10-year US-China visa extension will play a large role in pushing that number even higher: By 2018, the number of travelers from China is expected to hit 1 million.

This summer, the company launched a city partnership with Shanghai, which sends the most Chinese travelers to New York of all the Chinese cities.

The partnership includes an ad swap, with ads for New York City running in four major subway stations in Shanghai, and in the fall, ads for Shanghai will run on 164 bus shelters across New York.

"The cool thing is that it's not often you get to see a market emerge like this. It's so exciting to see China grow and be a part of this experience," Dixon said.

amyhe@chinadailyusa.com