A task force has been set up at Isfahan Province's office of the Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization to promote relations with China.
"In line with the provincial plans to explore new tourism markets and deepen engagement with Asian countries in the field of tourism, a task force was formally launched to develop tourism ties between Isfahan and China, a country with 130 million outbound tourists per year," a tourism marketing official, Kourosh Vakili, said on Saturday.
Vakili outlined a roadmap devised for the central province to expand a foothold in the giant tourism market of the East Asian state.
"First, marketing seminars will be held by Iran's embassy and consulates in Chinese metropolises, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, to promote Isfahan's tourist attractions," he was quoted as saying by CHTN.
Then, Isfahan's local businesses involved in the tourism sector will organize tourism exhibitions in China, and finally, their Chinese counterparts will be invited to visit Isfahan, where they will be presented with promotional material and a special package of discount services.
Chinese Travel Boom
Chinese tourists hailing from the middle, rich and the very rich classes, make hundreds of millions of visits and shower billions of dollars around the world every year.
The China government has been moving to dominate tourism since its late leader Deng Xiaoping gave a series of talks in 1979 on the central role of tourism for China as it opened to the world.
Tourism became an essential part of the country's seismic economic reforms and its bid to become a major world power.
The government gradually eased the Mao-era travel restrictions, instituted national holidays and vacations and used the country's new wealth to ride the wave of exploding global tourism.
Now the travel numbers are astonishing. For the fourth year in a row, the Chinese are the world's biggest group of international travelers, taking 142 million international trips in 2017.
In the next decade, that number is projected to jump to 390 million, according to the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute. Chinese tourists are the biggest international spenders: $258 billion last year.
All this has been accomplished at a time when only 7% of Chinese citizens hold passports.
Governments are going all out to attract these high-spending visitors.
