China Herald: Where do Shanghainese want to travel to?

Vallée de Joux, Lake Joux and lake Brenet from...

The times when Chinese wanted a fridge and a bicycle to show off their well-being are already over for a long time. But what are must-does for the Shanghainese today? Some visitors from Shanghai have been passing by and came up with their top-5 of travel destinations: the US, the UK, Switzerland, and surprising for me: South Africa and Russia.

They had already been in South Korea, Japan and Australia. While they were reasonably happy about those trips, they would not do it again. Simply too common, everybody is doing it. (It reminded me of Shaun Rein's observations about Nokia's downturn and Apple's upsurge). Still, with still a billion people to go, countries might be happy with a low-end, low-margin approach of their tourism market, but it might not be the most effective way to make money on the Chinese.

For that reason, Thailand was certainly a nono: Shanghainese are not even going to try that tourism destination. Both India and Indonesia are not yet excluded, like Thailand is, but they are also not in the top-5 destinations.

Remarkable is also the absence of the main European countries, apart from the UK and Switzerland. Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Greece were not even mentioned in their listing.