Instead they want to visit places that hold historical relevance for their own culture, they enjoy c

BERLIN/MADRID, March 7 (Reuters) - European airline tickets cheap last minute countries will need to focus less on beach holidays and more on communist history, rolling landscapes and even poetic trees if they want to take advantage of growing numbers of tourists from China.
While the overriding image of the Chinese tourist in Europe is one of busloads of shoppers heading for the luxury boutiques in Paris and Milan, Europe must not get carried away by these stereotypes and think of other ways to tempt them on a long-haul flight, experts at the ITB travel fair in Berlin said.
Instead they want to visit places that hold historical relevance for their own culture, they enjoy classical airline tickets cheap last minute music and, wanting to escape the smog back home, they appreciate a clear blue sky, Santander said, citing a study the group had done among Chinese web users.
Interesting places for Chinese travellers looking to explore airline tickets cheap last minute Communist history include airline tickets cheap last minute the German city of Trier, the birthplace of Karl Marx and Montargis, a little-known town 60 miles south of Paris.
Chinese history lovers are keen to visit Montargis because it was the home of Deng Xiaoping during the 1920s and said to be the place where a group of Chinese students first proposed the idea of a communist party for China.
With the euro zone crisis and austerity measures airline tickets cheap last minute crimping travel budgets in Europe, it has become all the more urgent for countries like Spain and Greece to look outside their traditional British, Dutch and German source markets for income.
In Spain, where tourism accounts for 11 percent of gross domestic product, 57.7 million tourists visited in 2012. But arrivals from Britain, airline tickets cheap last minute the country's biggest source market with close to a quarter of the total number of visitors, were flat.
It's not easy to adapt though and the ETC's Santander said his organisation would try to ensure all parts of the tourism chain, from taxi drivers to tour guides and luxury hotel owners were educated on Chinese travel wishes and customs.
Tour company Marly Camino, which offers high-end walking packages on the Way of St. James, a pilgrimage route to a cathedral in northern Spain, has seen an increase airline tickets cheap last minute in enquiries from Asian tourists from Singapore and the Philippines, but said there was only one official Chinese-speaking tour guide in the region.
airline tickets cheap last minute "There's the cultural barrier too, the etiquette is a little different. If we're going to be receiving that kind of client we want to be in the loop with how you treat that kind of client airline tickets cheap last minute and what they expect," said co-director Samantha Sacchi Muci.
Marly Camino therefore plans to create packages for Chinese agencies to directly market to tourists airline tickets cheap last minute to side-step the language barrier, saying it needs such agencies as an intermediary to help crack the market.
The islands made a conscious effort to attract arrivals from sun-wary China with island hopping tours, night fishing and snorkelling airline tickets cheap last minute when arrivals airline tickets cheap last minute from Europe collapsed after the deadly Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.
"Forty airline tickets cheap last minute years ago, when Germans and Brits first started coming to Spain and Greece, they were a strange race too," said Martin Buck, who helps organise the ITB, the world's largest travel and tourism fair.
As yet another manifestation of China's well-documented "rise," Chinese travelers are now taking the world by storm. Nowhere is that more evident than in the top tourist cities and surrounding suburban areas in North America.