Skift Take
Switzerland Tourism is employing “precision marketing” as the number of Chinese individual travelers rose last year while overall arrivals dropped. Tactics aim to be as precise as a Swiss watch; other destinations it competes with for longhaul Chinese travelers, including the U.S., Canada and New Zealand, should take note.
Editor's Note: Skift's Gateway series broadens our news coverage geographically with first-hand, original stories from correspondents embedded in cities around ravhe world.
We feature regular reports from Beijing, China; Capetown, South Africa, and Singapore. Gateway Beijing and Gateway Singapore, for example, signify that the reporters are writing from those cities although their coverage of the business of travel will meander to other locales in their regions. Read about the series here, and check out all the stories in the series here.
Rather than fret over a devastating 16 per cent drop in China (including Hong Kong) overnights last year, which they believe is temporary, the Swiss are pointing to the fact that travel by individual Chinese, as opposed to group travel, is rising.
It’s a trend the Swiss have been waiting for.
While travelers from China have grown to be Switzerland’s fifth largest market, with a record 1.52 million overnights in 2015, much of that is low-yield tour groups series taking the traditional route of Italy-Switzerland-France, and largely benefiting Swiss destinations such as Lucerne and Interlaken.
Terror attacks in European hot spots last year, along with low prices in new destinations in eastern, northern and southwestern Euro
