Published on : Wednesday, April 3, 2019
At the recently concluded annual Bay Area Travel and Adventure Show in Santa Clara, California, several visitors stopped at the booth of Alex Wang, a travel agency owner. They collected the brochures or bombarded him with questions about the travel itineraries the company provided.
“We have attended the show for several years to promote our travel products. There’s an increasing interest from Americans, including Chinese-Americans in the Bay Area,” says Wang, president of Chinatour.com, a Southern California-based tour operator.
In front of a big picture of Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, Wang distributed several brochures and flyers at the recent two-day exhibition.
“We provide both high-end luxury tours and budget tours for young people,” he says. “Customers who are retired tend to choose long-haul tours, such as our Yangtze River cruise, which is very popular. Young people are usually attracted to short tours, such as week-long visits to Beijing, Shanghai and Xi’an.”
The booths of the China National Tourist Office (CNTO) and couple of Chinese tourist agencies were the most visited ones. Even people waited in queue to get a free souvenir, like Chinese zodiac bookmarks and panda calendars.
Cynthia Chang, who received a bookmark, explains that she had always wanted to explore the hometown of her father in East China’s Jiangsu province. As a second-generation Chinese-American, she says what attracted her most was history, culture and food of China.
“The Bay Area is a very important market for us. It’s one of the most affluent regions in the country and people here are generally more familiar with Chinese culture because of the large Chinese community,” says Emma Ma, who works for the Los Angeles branch of the CNTO, which promotes tourism to China.