The Global Business Travel Association Predicts China’s Business Travel Spending to reach US$ 245 billion by 2013.
BEIJING– The Global Business Travel Association (“GBTA”), a business travel and corporate meetings organization, announced last May the results of its inaugural GBTA BTI™ Outlook – China, sponsored by Visa. The GBTA BTI™ provides a way to distill market performance and the outlook for business travel into a single metric that can be tracked over time.
Business travel spending in China is forecast to increase by 17 % in 2012 and 21 % in 2013, to US$ 202 billion and US$ 245 billion respectively. Growth in international outbound travel spending is expected to be particularly strong, rising by 27 % in 2013. Chinese investment in infrastructure must then keep up with the explosion in demand. Over the last decade, the country’s four largest airports have doubled in size and there are plans for the construction of over 100 new airports in the next decade:
China is currently ranked second in the business travel market according to the GBTA findings, but is forecast to surpass the USA as early as 2015. Over the past decade, China has experienced rapid economic growth which is reflected in China’s dramatic increase in business travel spending. Between 2000 and 2011, business travel spending averaged over 16 % a year in overall travel spending. The good rate of growth was largely driven by both meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibition business trips alongside a rise in the amount of real spend-per-trip. The rise of business travel spending is also a reflection of increase in expenditure in both domestic and international travel.
Over the next ten years, GBTA forecasts that China’s business travel spending will reflect the recovery of the global economy. Later in the forecast horizon, international outbound travel spending by Chinese business travellers is expected to increase even more in percentage terms and reach 27% in 2013. Domestically, business travel spending is expected to reach US$ 233 billion by 2013.
Theodore is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of TravelDailyNews Media Network; his responsibilities include business development and planning for TravelDailyNews long-term opportunities.
