October 10, 2022  (Shanghai) - As Hong Kong removed quarantine on 23 September 2022, and Macau announced the expectation of first tourist group from Mainland China in November, more airlines resume international flight to China. This show a major step ending Global isolation and positive news for the China and global travel industry. 

To get connected B2B with Chinese travel agents, this maybe a good time to consider creating a Tourism Specialist Program or online travel training for Chinese travel agents, and share your destination or products with travel & tourism Chinese professionals worldwide. Custom made your on-demand courses. 

China Eastern and Shanghai Airlines will fly 22 international routes per week in July, including from Shanghai to New York, according to the WeChat account of China Eastern on Thursday. Hainan Airlines expects to add routes including Beijing to Moscow and Beijing-Tokyo.

Covid-19 caught the world off-guard. Since March 2020, many NTOs, DMOs, tourism boards, hotels, airlines, and attractions started offering webinars.  Much of the target audience for these businesses were new to the idea and were not sure what do to, so they just signed up. In the beginning, the webinars were well-received, even though many of the webinars lasted for more than an hour. China Travel Online also did several successful webinars in this early stage.

As time past, tourism boards, hotels, airlines, and the like cut webinars to 30 minutes and then 10 minutes. The webinar witness in April 2021 was done by the Polish National Tourist Office in Beijing. And only nine participants signed up during the EUROPE Virtual Travel Trade Show in China.

Many destination are preparing to reach b2b audience. Currently webinar is heavily use across the board. A webinar is one or a few speakers doing a presentation or briefing, sometimes with a Q&A. However, webinars slowly became less popular in China, due to several factors including inflexible timing, less interactive, and not able to do it anytime, anywhere. 

E-learning in a nutshell is online training with certification.  Known as "Specialist Program", it is suitable for destination, hotels, attractions, MICE, transportation e.g. Airline, airport. Unlike previous version of online travel training, the current E-learning 3.0 technology by Digital China, provide more features, easy-to-use, interaction and more importantly, customization for the Chinese market that non-Chinese platform cannot fulfil. 

For example, lets say you have a student named Ms. Chen. Ms. Chen can collect points in real-time while answering a set of questions in exchange for a gift card or even cash! Online training or e-learning is nothing new, but e-learning has evolved tremendously, thanks to 3.0 technology within PCs and mobile phones (stand alone H5 design app, not web-based), as well as a gamification and reward system to make the lessons more appealing. At the point of writing this post, we have managed to help approximately 28 destinations launch e-learning programs.  

View an example of E-learning for destination here.

Source: Digital China