Germany wants more from China (Special report: CITM 2008)

SHANGHAI - Germany is not letting the worldwide financial crisis dampen its optimism on the China market. Horst Lommatzch, executive of Deutschland Das Reiseland, said that while arrivals from China into Germany has slowed down this year, they are still expecting an increase over last year’s figures.

Lommatzch said, “Inbound from China to Germany is increasing. It is not as much as in the years before but this year we had 1.4-percent increase till August.” He added that despite the disruption in inbound traffic from China into Germany because of the Sichuan earthquake and the Olympic Games, the number of Chinese visitors to Germany has increased.

Chinese interest in Germany has spawned, in turn, German travel trade interest in the market. “At the moment, we are increasing our participants from Germany. So we have a bigger stand. It is very important to get more people and more participants, more destinations, more incoming operators from Germany here at CITM,” he said.

The tourism board is growing its China arrivals to one million overnights by 2010 and two million overnights by 2015. China is currently its third largest source market after the US and Japan. He pointed out the lead of Japan is over by 200,000 overnights.