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Building a tourist industry that helps foreigners

By Victor Paul Borg (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-07-24 14:16

[The author Victor Paul Borg is a Maltese travel journalist.]

The paradox of tourism in China is that despite an unforgettable range of attractions, the country is a frustrating destination for foreign tourists. There are other contradictions. The tourist infrastructure is good (hotels, restaurants, and transport network), but not readily accessible; the people are inquisitive and hospitable, but the country remains aloof and inscrutable for most foreigners.

Among the reasons for these dichotomies, the biggest is the inability of most people who work in tourism to speak English. It's a vexing situation, when you cannot communicate with your client.

I know that this is old news, and that things are changing; students are learning English from younger age and for longer, and tourism authorities are eager to foster English proficiency among tourism service providers.

But I'm reiterating this news here because in the course of my work - travel writing - I can see that most tourism departments can do more to dismantle the language barrier in the short term by some direct measures that could yield immediate economic gains.

I'll discuss these later; first, let me illustrate how this dispirits foreign tourists, costing China potential gains - the language barrier is one of the main reasons why the number of foreign visitors remains relatively low compared to the diversity and size of the country.

For a non-Chinese speaker, something as simple as finding and buying a ticket for an internal flight, or figuring out which bus goes to where and then getting to the bus station, becomes a complex multi-hour task, like playing treasure hunt.

Or let's say a foreigner goes to a restaurant to eat, and, finding no English menu, is forced to make his choices in either one of two ways: either point at pictures of dishes on the menu, or go inside the kitchen and point out the individual ingredients.

Both ways lead to hits and misses; pictures don't always reveal the type of meat in the dish, or whether a dish is spicy or sour or sweet, so the diner is likely to end up with something he doesn't like - perhaps intestines or pig's ears, or another foodstuff that's a delicacy for Chinese but distasteful for most foreigners. And if a foreigner points out the ingredients, he still has no influence on how the ingredients are cooked and what they are mixed with.

This is one example of how China remains distant: China has great food, but foreigners end up with dishes that don't impress them because they have no way of ordering what they like.

Yet it's easy for tourism departments to change this with direct measures by having each province set up a team that helps restaurants in tourist areas to design new menus that would have English translations (this is something that has been done in Beijing as part of the run-up to the Olympics).

Another thing that can be done is setting up a 24-hour hotline for tourists that would be modeled on the existing 114 hotline: tourists can call this hotline to find out transport options to wherever they want to go, the availability of hotels, addresses and opening hours of museums and other sights, and other similar things. Such a hotline would ensure a smoother and more rewarding experience in China.

The benefits of carrying out these changes can yield quick results in larger volumes of tourists, as the experience of provinces that have made some headway in this direction shows. For example, an official in Sichuan once asked me why Yunnan gets more foreign tourists than Sichuan, yet the latter had more spectacular mountains and more diverse attractions.

The reason is English proficiency: along the classical tourist route in Yunnan, from Kunming to Dali to Lijiang to Shangri La, foreigners find a network of hotels and restaurants and cafes where English is spoken or at least is on the menu. But this isn't the case in Sichuan; for example, out of more than 90 hotels in Jiuzhaigou, only at two of them - the only two five-star hotels - can anyone speak communicable English.

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