Visitors to Sydney’s five-star Sofitel may not even notice the subtle changes the hotel began bringing in three years ago.
Alongside the eggs, cereal and fruit on the breakfast buffet sit chopsticks, pickled vegetables and a Chinese soup called congee.
Sales and Marketing Coordinator Rui Li is one of the hotel’s Mandarin speaking staff. She says the diverse offering is “very, very popular.”
“Normally, the congee goes very quickly,” she says. “Providing Chinese breakfast doesn’t mean they have to eat it all the time, we just want to provide a good selection of food.”
“Lots of people prefer to have a combination of Chinese breakfast and Australian, western breakfast.”
Kate Marshall, International Sales Director at Sofitel's parent company, Accor, says the hotel group introduced a dedicated strategy three years ago to provide better services for Chinese guests.
“Our staff go through training to understand the Chinese culture and the Chinese people, and our hotels roll out mandatory requirements within the hotels,” she says.
She believes it’s made a significant difference to the company’s bottom line.
“Accor has seen some great growth in the last three years from this market.”
Katherine Cole, Regional Director at the hotel booking website Hotels.com says there's a big incentive for tourism operators in Australia to make such changes.
“There are 1.36 billion Chinese [people], of which 97 million travelled in 2013, so this presents an enormous opportunity to the Australian tourism industry,” she says.
The number of China’s citizens on the move internationally is expected to increase dramatically, as more people gain access to the country's rising wealth.
In China, preparations are also underway to cater to growing numbers of international tourists.
The country's largest airline, China Southern, has plans to increase the number of weekly flights to Australia from 31 to 38 this year, to meet growing demand.
Zhou Junbao, the airline's Senior Vice President of Marketing says Australia's natural beauty and relative proximity makes it an attractive destination.
“With the continuing improvement of Chinese people's living standards, more and more of them would like to go abroad,” he says.
Visiting Australia marks a shift in old habits, he says, even among those with a history of international travel.
“Many Chinese travellers used to go to Japan, South Korea and south east Asia,” he says.
He cites natural disasters in south east Asia, such as typhoon Haiyan, and tensions in the South China Sea, as catalysts for habitual change.
According to details released by Tourism Research Australia earlier this year, Chinese tourists make up Australia's second-largest group of visitors, behind New Zealand.
But when it comes to who stays the longest - and who spends the most - China tops the list on both counts.
Kate Marshall says it’s a dramatic transformation of the tourism market Australia catered to, just a decade ago.
“Our focus ten years ago was the Japanese market where we made sure we all had miso on the breakfast buffet. These days, we're more likely to have congee on the breakfast buffet,” she says.
But Katherine Cole says tourist operators need not dramatically transform their business, to benefit.
“Chinese travellers still want to experience a uniquely Australian experience, they just want some of the comforts of home, so they can read about what they're eating, so they can read about where they're going.”
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