Known as the “before trip + during trip” market, the Chinese outbound travelers were kept growing at a YoY growth rate of 12% for 2018 compared to 2017, spent over €107 billion and average spending of €5340 per person, reached 8.5% YoY growth. More experience and cultural oriented trips were made than 2017, however, shopping (25%), accommodation (18%) and dining (16%) are still ranking top 3 spending categories. Europe is now becoming the fastest growing destination for Chinese outbound travelers and replacing South Asia as Chinese’s new most wanted next destination. Mobile Payment was also boosting the Chinese tourists’ spending and vitalizes local businesses, in 2018, 69% of outbound Chinese tourists used mobile payment while abroad, up by 4% from the previous year, Alipay and WeChat Pay’s merchants are now covering 54 and 49 countries with system providers like 2paynow helping local merchants have access to both and enable related Tax Refund integration seamlessly.

Cross-border E-Commerce was new to Chinese but growing rapidly in the past 3 years at double digitals, this €200 Billion market was dominated by B2C marketplaces like Tmall Global, JD Global, and Kaola and was in most of the cases considered as a separate market, but now it is also starting to be connected and influenced by the Chinese outbound travelers. With the personal experience and witness of Chinese tourists shopping at merchant’s stores in Europe, the trust can now be converted into after trip re-purchase and shared amount family and friends who don’t have to be personally in Europe for shopping, the easy payment and order H5 web-store and WeChat Mini-Program adapted to merchants’ ERP system realized much better conversation rate for merchants to grow its incremental sales towards China, the dependence on peak tourist season is no longer needed, because now after golden week, merchants can still participate in shopping festival of Single’s day and 12.12.

Not only the daily expenses, accommodation and tuition fee but also the massive buying power for friends and family back to China, the growing number of local Chinese including overseas workers and students are driven the spending as well, €78.7 billion was spent in 2018 from the Chinese live outside of China, more local Chinese oriented start-ups like food delivery and mobile We-Media were created to serve this growing market. Mobile Payment and its eco-system are key for their success because of its quicker access to nearby Chinese consumers and convenience of ordering and making payments, more comprehensive data analysis can also help merchants get a better understanding of their customer profile and behavior to improve marketing and operation strategy.