Shifting Preferences of Mainland Chinese Tourists' Interests from Luxury to Budget Experiences in Hong Kong - Data From Little Redbook

It seems that Hong Kong will never be the same as before.

Background

Not long ago, news reports in Hong Kong media started to highlight the changing preferences of mainland tourists. The main theme was that, after two years of COVID-19 lockdowns, the high expectations of a boom in tourism were wrong. Mainland tourists did come to Hong Kong, but there were fewer, who spent less.

The tourism industry is a critical component of Hong Kong's economy, contributing to approximately 4.5% of its GDP and employing around 257,000 people, accounting for about 6.6% of total employment in 2018 (GovHK, 2020). More than 80% of the total inflow of tourists was contributed by mainland visitors (Hong Kong Tourism Board, 2023). However, visitor arrivals experienced a significant downturn starting in 2019, which persisted until the full border reopening in February 2023. For more than three years, travel restrictions such as cross-border regulations, and quarantine requirements greatly diminished the volume of mainland and international visitors. These circumstances led to devastating losses in both the aviation and tourism industries in Hong Kong (Tsui et al., 2021). 

Despite the closure of more than 300 agencies in the past three years, hundreds of new ones emerged during the same period (Su, 2023), highlighting a high expectation within the tourism sector. What do mainland tourists think?

In the first quarter of 2023, the Hong Kong government launched the "Hello Hong Kong" campaign to further boost tourism, and the city's Chief Executive expressed optimism for the May holidays, emphasizing the numerous attractions that contribute to the city's economic performance. Despite this positive outlook, recent news reports have highlighted the shifting preferences of mainland visitors who no longer visit Hong Kong solely for shopping (Westbrook et al., 2023). As reported, mainland tourists have been increasingly drawn to new places, such as recently opened museums in the West Kowloon Cultural District launched during the pandemic. These institutions include M+, which is dedicated to 20th and 21st century visual culture, and the Palace Museum, which displays artifacts from the National Palace Museum in Beijing. This trend indicates a significant shift in the preferences of mainland visitors towards new cultural attractions. Some summarized that the current mainland tourists have different expectations and cultural preferences visiting Hong Kong (RTHK News, 2023).

Interestingly, eye-catching touring phenomenon emerged as mainland visitors on low-cost tours have been enthusiastically enjoying Hong Kong's reopening, filling their itineraries with sightseeing and photo-taking. The return of these budget tour groups has sparked mixed reactions among local residents, with some expressing displeasure over the crowds and viral images of tourists eating takeaway food in bustling neighborhoods (Liu, 2023). This contrast highlights a broader range of attractions beyond luxury retail and suggests an emerging new mode of travel to Hong Kong. Furthermore, some reported that mainland young generations prefer new experience in Hong Kong, examples include visiting Kennedy Town for scenic ocean views, and exploring Tung Choi Street in Mong Kok, which is known for its ornamental fish in transparent plastic bags (DotDotNews, 2023).

Method

Early this year, I submitted a research proposal and suggested investigating such a shift. Unfortunately, someone on the panel thought this was gimmicky. Nevertheless, I will present a budget version of my proposed research outcome here, since I am also experiencing hardship.

Similar to the Tang Ping study I conducted earlier, utilizing some paid crawlers online, a total of 2,000 recent user posts were collected from Little Red Book (i.e., Xiao Hong Shu). These posts were collected by searching the keyword "Hong Kong" in Chinese. Because the platform did not offer an API, we had limited control over the number of posts and their time span. After removing duplicates, user information, and punctuation, I tokenized these posts using jieba with an add-on user dictionary, resulting in a corpus consisting of over 20,000 rows of content. Next, I trained the  tokenized corpus using fastText model in genism using CBOW in 200 dimensions, with a minimal word frequency of 10, 5 epochs, a window of size 5 and 10 negatives.

Results

Even with such a small sample, I have to say the results are as expected: mainland tourists are now leaning towards budget tour, same as my proposal predicted.

First, let's take a look at the top 50 words frequently co-occurring with "Hong Kong":

You probably noticed a lot of words are related to budget tour. For example, 12 省钱 (saving money), 19 + 21 薅羊毛 (slang, "pluck wool": collecting coupons), 28 特种兵 (slang, "special forces": visiting as many places as possible in a limited period of time), 41 平价 (cheap, discount), 45 & 50 Citywalk. 

(a news report in Hong Kong about citywalk can be found here)

The 51 to 100 on the list are not much different. Walk, food...and yes, 77 穷游 (budget trip).

 

 

Anything about luxury shopping, jewelry, fancy hotels, international brands? No.

In fact, when I searched for words like "美容" (beauty) and "医疗" (medical), they were not even included in the posts. Maybe it's a small sample problem, or it's about the target users of Little Redbook, but at least they are not under the spotlight among thousands of new posts.

Such a change is probably painful for Hong Kong, especially for businesses that rely on mainland tourists and somehow still believed in economic recovery. Indeed, mainland people are experiencing difficult times after COVID-19.

Let's put some words together in a network:

Apart from the words mentioned above, there's a small cluster about "study abroad", "Master Degree" and "Quality Migrant Admission Scheme", which is very consistent with what the government has proposed. Oh, where did "financial insurance" go? Left corner, right there sticking with "Apple", "gold", "jewelry" and "expensive". 

Now it’s quite clear that, at least among mainland people, Hong Kong is viewed more like an ancient town (古镇, an iconic style of tourism in China, usually branding their food and photo-taking tours) rather than a financial center or a Dubai-/Doha-like city.

How to deal with it? It's beyond what I can offer as I am only a psychologist, sort of. But the government should consider what kind of tourism they want to develop, and whether transforming Hong Kong into another ancient town is worth it. 

(another piece of news about the nightlife event in Hong Kong)

I am now collecting user posts from Weibo, which I can have better control. It may be interesting to compare these two platforms in the coming weeks.

References

• DotDotNews. (2023, May 1). 五一長假來香港不止購物！內地年輕人開發新玩法. 點新聞-Dotdotnews. https://www.dotdotnews.com/a/202305/01/AP644f36f4e4b0919c255b138a.html
• GovHK. (2020). GovHK: Fact sheets - Tourism. https://www.gov.hk/en/about/abouthk/factsheets/
• Hong Kong Tourism Board. (2023). Tourism Statistics—Hong Kong Tourism Board. https://www.discoverhongkong.com/eng/hktb/newsroom/tourism-statistics.html
• Liu, O. (2023, March 30). Mainland Chinese tourists on low-cost Hong Kong trips soak up city sights. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/hong-kong-economy/article/3215307/mainland-chinese-visitors-low-cost-tours-revel-return-hong-kong-while-residents-divided-impact
• RTHK News. (2023, May 1). 學者認為內地客來港遊玩模式已變 倡加強推廣地道文化—RTHK. https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/ch/component/k2/1698675-20230501.htm
• Su, Z. (2023, January 19). A long way to normalcy for Hong Kong tourism. Chinadailyhk. https://s.chinadailyhk.com/iiUnIz
• Tsui, K. W. H., Fu, X., Chen, T., Lei, Z., & Wu, H. (2021). Analyzing Hong Kong’s inbound tourism: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. IATSS Research, 45(4), 440–450. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iatssr.2021.11.003
• Westbrook, L., Yeo, R., & Huifeng, H. (2023, April 19). Why do mainland Chinese tourists no longer find Hong Kong cool? South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/hong-kong-economy/article/3217505/why-are-mainland-chinese-tourists-cool-hong-kongs-attractions-luxury-goods-lose-lustre-and-language