Ted, the Chinese are coming

I heard our extensive network of chinese eateries tipped it in our favour...

They wont be long wishing they were back in China when they fork out a weeks wages for an evening meal for two and a cuppa.

RATM wrote: »

In before the 'sure they're a great bunch of lads'

There's only one thing worst than the tired use of..."a great bunch of lads" and it's someone starting a post with..."in before"

ScumLord wrote: »

The Chinese are living the booming economy dream, they think spending a lot of money on something makes it good and increases their status among their peers.

Sounds familiar, maybe they like coming over here to see what they will be like in 5 years time.

Very hard to cater for the Chinese hospitality wise

with their wacky food and superstitions

Clareboy wrote: »

The Chinese must be very hard up for somewhere to go if they regard this country as one of their top destinations!

Because Ireland is a kip and there's nothing to see here?

:rolleyes:

They aren’t going to come so forget about it.

The ‘we need Chinese tourism to save us’ meme is one of the more irritating ones out there at the moment because it’s so woefully misinformed.

Having lived with several Chinese people and discussed this with them I’ve come to learn certain facts.

The Chinese are among the highest spending foreign tourists out there, on average they spend 6 times what other tourists spend. This of course makes tourism chiefs salivate and pop trouser tents, but it doesn’t seem make them ask, why?
The answer is simple. The Chinese middle class that travels are part of a nouveau riche boom and they love to spend on luxury goods. For these goods, just as we did in the boom years, they head to New York, Paris and London. It’s all about prestige and brands. As an example of this, I once incurred the wrath of one of my Chinese flat mates when I emptied out the hot press that she had filled full of those fancy ‘Brown Thomas’ type of paper shopping bags from every shop she’d bought stuff from. You’d swear I’d thrown away their contents instead from the way she reacted.
The bald truth of the matter is that Grafton St. and Henry St. carry neither the prestige or the brands of 5th Avenue or Oxford St. and never will. We don’t have the population or the number of indigenous high spenders to sustain them. Even during the boom we didn’t. The average Irish high street has nothing to offer that any english highstreet doesn't.
The Chinese travel to shop (again a fact borne out by their spending figures), they have very little interest in sightseeing, sure some sightseeing may be done, but it’s an incidental activity and again it’s based upon prestige locations, a snap in front of the Eiffel tower impresses much more then a snap in front of the spire. They have zero interests in 1916 walking tours or Dublin pubs.
Then there is the manner in which they travel and how they like to be accommodated. Fionn Davenport, the travel writer was making this point on Newstalk last week.
The Chinese like to travel in large groups and tend to take over hotels, they want Mandarin speakers at the front desk and there are many other cultural quirks like the fact that they won’t stay on the 4th floor (because four sound too close to the Mandarin for death). They are very culturally and gastronomically conservative, they balk in horror at a ‘full Irish’ at breakfast. What they want is typically their own regional fare, so they want stuff like rice and pickled eggs for breakfast, but even then the northern Chinese won’t eat what the southern Chinese prefer and vice versa.
Now picture a group of English or American tourists arriving to a Chinese front desk and a breakfast buffet with deep fried chicken feet and you quickly see how fast you are likely to alienate 90% of your existing tourist base to chase this market, the 90% that actually want an ‘Irish experience’ rather then a Chinese one.

Sorry lads in Toursim Ireland, but Yu Ming is a fantasy on a par with leprechaun's and pot's of gold at the end of rainbows. These are traveller that would look on in horror if you tried to usherthem into a bar with an open turf fire burning on one corner and a 'straw roof'. Horror and confusion, after all, why would the travel all the way across the world to spend time in such a 'pesant enviornment'?

A newspaper with 600 thousand readers in China would be the equivalent to the Roscommon herald - don't get your hopes up boys there ain't no Celtic dragon coming!

RobbieTheRobber wrote: »

Chinese Restaurants in Ireland bear as much resemblance to Chinese cuisine as Italian(Irish) Chippers do to Italian food.

You mean they don't eat deep fried battered chicken balls and chips with a side of curry sauce? Isn't that their national dish...

RobbieTheRobber wrote: »

Conorhal, China has over 1 billion people so making massive assumptions like you have done and applying them to them all is beyond stupid!

I'm not talking about a billion people, I'm talking about the couple million members of the Chinese nouveau riche that actually travel.

RobbieTheRobber wrote: »

Can I ask where you are getting your knowledge of (all) Chinese people from?

I asked my Chinese flatmates, and other sources such as Fionn Davenport who I quoted. Various people in the know etc.

RobbieTheRobber wrote: »

Edit: They don't care about the store they bought it in, the Chinese middle classes (i have met) are canny consumers.
They are looking for big brand names but they are also conscious of the price they pay for it.

They are very price concious I grant you, one of the reason for the big spend is that when they buy, they often buy for the whole family. But I assure you, the store does matter (hence my anecdote about the hotpress full of bags.) If they can find prestigious AND cheap they practically orgasam.

RobbieTheRobber wrote: »

The Chinese I have met also like to brag and so the new element that tourism in Ireland will offer over other more traveled areas gives that bragging rights.
Finally one of the big draws Ireland has over other EU countries is that we speak English which is a language of growing importance to China

Most Chinese couldn't point out Ireland on a map, there's few bragging rights to that.
It's only in the west that we feel the need to brag about having been somewhere remote that no other traveller has been before, where you keep up with the joneses by keeping ahead of them. That's because the advent of mass tourism means that there are no bragging rights associated with Benidorm. In China where mass tourism is a new thing they go where everybody else goes to brag about.

English is good, Mandarin is better, that's why they prefer London and New York.