![](\"http:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/images\/20050511-holidayinnsanya-gminterviewsmall.gif\")
China's Hainan offers a tropical island paradise at the southern tip of China with beautiful beaches and year-round sunshine. Its many undeveloped areas enable tourists to see water buffallo, rice paddies, and fishing boats parked on the sand. Sanya, the island's key attraction, is destined for change, though, and will continue to evolve as a vacation destination for years to come.
\n<\/p>\n
With the national economy growing, the standard of living will continue to improve and more Chinese people will have the funds to take vacations or business retreats to Hainan and Sanya. The biggest feeder market for Hainan will not be the international clientele, but will always be guests from the mainland's major cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu and Chongqing.<\/p>\n
The Miss World Contest, which has already been held in Sanya three times, has helped raise the island's profile. And with an increasing amount of MICE business, Sanya is attracting more domestic and international businesses to the area for their meetings and conferences. And where you have business, you will find golf. A number of golf courses are already built and with more on the way we should be able to attract golf clientele. Sanya will soon be one of the world's top golf destinations.<\/p>\n
This being said, I do not believe that Sanya will ever be an international destination like Phuket or Bali. The local arts and crafts, the outdoor tourist activities, and the availability of international restaurants are still at the early stage of development.<\/p>\n
The international clientele will of course increase, especially from England, Germany, France and Scandinavian countries, but this volume will be limited because there are only about 3 or 4 months of activity in the year for these Europeans to travel. One exception is the increasing number of tourists coming from Russia and former Soviet republics. We should see a boom in tourists from these areas.<\/p>\n
In my opinion there are still challenges that we need to tackle in Hainan. We need to find solutions in closing the gap between low season and high season. We do have examples in the region where the same problem happened and solutions were found. Look at Phuket. They organise year-round activities on the island to fill the hotels and have become a success. Hua Hin in Thailand had a similar challenge and they also managed to attract tourists during the low season by organising activities in the city.<\/p>\n
Sanya has still a long way to go. During high season the hotels have an average occupancy of 80% and during low season about 40%. With so many new hotels being opened and built each year, there is no choice for Sanya but to find solutions to bring more visitors to this beautiful area. A number of activities have already been initiated by the official tourism authorities which is a good start and very encouraging for the future. But in my opinion much more needs to be done. I would like to see during low months events like local carnivals, jazz festivals, sea sport competitions, elephant football competitions between cities, culinary tropical competitions between the top chefs, beach dancing parties–the list goes on!<\/p>\n
Sanya needs to be promoted as a Destination. Currently, hotels promote their own hotel individually and are not working together to develop and market the destination of Sanya. There are a number of good initiatives recently started by the Sanya Hotel Association and I see good signs that the hoteliers are getting together to promote the Destination of Sanya.<\/p>\n
Take my company as an example. We have the Intercontinental, Crown Plaza, Holiday Inn and Express by Holiday Inn brands already in China. As the biggest international hotel company in Sanya, we are contributing to the development of the hotel industry and we should expect a substantial number of additional hotels to open in China in the coming years. Our hotels are reaching out to others to help the entire industry grow, which will benefit all. It is exciting for all of us to be part of this explosion.<\/p>\n
The next step will be to get the tourism officials to work more closely with the hoteliers and airlines like Dragon Air, Hainan Airlines and China Southern to support any good initiative to promote Sanya as a tourism destination. The next few years will tell if the result is there or not.<\/p>\n
Another challenge is that Hainan and Sanya as a tourism and MICE destination are still too expensive for the average traveler. It now competes with other regional tourism spots like Kunming, Qingdao, Hong Kong, Phuket and Penang. The flights are still expensive today because of the low number of airlines coming to Sanya. During low season we need to have more flexibility in order to compete with other areas.<\/p>\n
Finally, the quality and standard of services is a challenge for the future. Many quality hotels are opened in Sanya all the time and more will come in the years ahead. It is really difficult today to find qualified employees to work in the hotel industry due to the rapid growth of the hotel industry. The result being that the level of services offered are not always as they should be. I think setting up a good hotel school with international professionals will help improve the present status and will support the quality development of the tourism for Sanya.<\/p>\n
Sanya is a place of opportunity, potential, and beauty. We already have seen that it can attract both great investment and eager travelers. Now we must point our sights at improving on nature's beauty to build a destination that will attract travelers at all times during the year.<\/p>\n
By Christophe Lajus China's Hainan offers a tropical island paradise at the southern tip of China with beautiful beaches and year-round sunshine. Its many undeveloped areas enable tourists to see water buffallo, rice paddies, and fishing boats parked on the sand. Sanya, the island's key attraction, is destined for change, though, and will continue to evolve as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12723],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinahospitalitynews.com\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nGeneral Manager of Holiday Inn Resort Yalong Bay Sanya
\n<\/strong><\/font>Christophe Lajus is the General Manager of Holiday Inn Resort Yalong Bay Sanya. He has been in Sanya for three years and six months. Born in France, he graduated from the Lausanne Hotel and Tourism School. He has been a General manager for 6 Hotels in the past 15 years in the Caribbean and Asia at such places as The Cotton House on Mustique Island in the Caribbean) and at Banyan Tree in Indonesia.<\/font><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"