Chinese tourists’ motivations to visit Barcelona

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to find out what motivates Chinese tourists to choose Barcelona as their holiday destination instead of gravitating towards another option. It will evaluate if Chinese tourists are authenticity-sensible when visiting the most well-known tourist attractions in the city.

In addition, it aims to provide recommendations to both academics and researchers in order to improve the city’s attractions and their adaptability to the Chinese market, which has been proven to lack on a few aspects such as language translations.

In order to achieve these results, a focus group was carried out. A group of five Chinese students in Barcelona during their academic program for six months were involved in the process. In addition, throughout this dissertation knowledge is constructed by an inductive approach used to analyse the evaluation of the qualitative data collected.

Following an analysis of the data, it is shown that the tendency of Chinese tourists is slightly changing in terms of grouping when travelling yet the majority agrees when ranking the main reasons why they chose Barcelona are: shopping, safety, security and modernism. As reports forecast, in the following years, Barcelona will have to redesign their marketing approach since more and more Barcelona will be receiving young intercultural Chinese tourists, with different priorities, and with this, different motivations to travel.