During this year’s National Day holiday, China saw 765 million domestic trips and ¥700.8 billion ($99b) in spending. As travellers seek deeper cultural connections, “Neo-Chinese night tours” emerged as popular experiences, presenting new growth opportunities for the tourism industry.

As the “lying flat” lifestyle grows among Chinese workers looking to unwind, more urbanites are seeing the allure of cruises return. This stress-free approach to travel fits perfectly with the cruise experience, leading more Chinese to choose cruises as their ideal escape.

China Skinny attended the debut of ITB China, the latest B2B trade show specifically for the Chinese Travel Market. Growing on the success of the travel industry’s largest trade show ITB Berlin as well as ITB Singapore, ITB China looked to service growing demand for the world’s most important tourism market with its inaugural year in Shanghai. Below are our takeaways among the Chinese travel market.

The act of shopping has spread across different countries in unique ways, and each market has adopted its own local habits, trends, influences and behaviours. China is a country where shopping plays a huge role in daily life, as consumers regard shopping a higher priority in their lives compared to other markets. The graphic below illustrates to what extent shopping shapes Chinese' lifestyles

As recently as 2012, most Chinese consumers considered international labels categorically better than local alternatives. KFC was a good example: although consumers knew deep-fried drumsticks weren't a super-food, they were from an American company so must be safer, and therefore healthier, than Chinese options that could be cooked in gutter oil, with additives like melamine. That perception helped fuel more than two new KFC restaurant openings a day in China that year.

Despite slowing GDP growth in China, continued income growth is seeing more Mainlanders reaching the necessary standards of living to engage in travel. In 2012, Mainland China surpassed both Germany and the U.S. to become the largest spenders on international tourism. The United Nations World Tourism Organization released a report on Chinese traveller habits counting more than 83.2 million Chinese citizens travelling abroad, a 395.7% increase since 2002. The following buzzwords will help you understand the changes and massive influx of Chinese travellers, their habits and the latest trends going on in China’s travel market.

Few markets have experienced changes in the way that China has over the past few decades.

It's easy to spot grim news about China with a quick scan of the headlines these days.  News of plummeting stocks, slowing GDP and sales growth could be interpreted as the end of China's golden run.

If you're looking for a jaw-dropping illustration of China's growing presence in the world, go no further than the United Nations World Tourism Organisation's outbound tourism expenditure chart from the world's largest economies over the past 20 years.

New Balance has done some great work positioning itself as an aspirational, but affordable fashion brand in China. It’s hard to walk a block in China’s hipper urban suburbs without seeing young fashionistas sporting NB shoes. But for those sitting in the Boston HQ, that success would have been slightly tarnished by the recent ruling that New Balance’s Chinese brand name, XīnBǎiLún, was violating a Guangdong businessman’s trademark.

The folk in Beijing are working hard to continue to raise the standard of living of Chinese consumers, aiming to transition the economy from low value manufacturing to higher value innovation, service and consumption.

109 million Chinese tourists travelled ‘abroad’ last year – a particularly impressive number given just 31 million did so in 2005. Yet, what many reports don’t highlight is that more than two thirds of those travellers were visiting Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.

In a country where more than 500 new products launch every day, celebrities can help your brand get noticed in China. They can also give your products credibility, when many other goods go untrusted.

It wasn’t long ago when any Chinese city with a Starbucks was considered Tier 1 or 2. How things have changed. Starbucks will have more than 1,500 outlets in almost 90 cities by the end of this year, with many of the new openings in Tier 3 or lower areas.

Success in China can depend on how the Government feels about your industry or brand. At the opening of China’s annual parliamentary meeting in Beijing this month, Premier Li Keqiang outlined the Government’s “Internet Plus” strategy, increasing support for China’s ecommerce industry and its international expansion – if it wasn’t growing fast enough already.

It’s upon us. No sooner have the Christmas decorations come down, and the red lanterns, woolly sculptures and giant inflatable sheep have popped up in every corner of China with even more gusto. The excitement is further fuelled by infinite fireworks explosions, gushy television commercials, and the biggest consumer spend-up of the year.

Last week in Beijing, free Wifi was rolled out across 12,000 of the city’s buses. It’s great news for the millions of Internet-obsessed commuters in the capital, but also relevant for tourism operators in the West.

Group travel has been losing its shine for some time with Chinese tourists. Research by TNS last August found that 62% of Chinese tourists would prefer to travel independently. This has been backed up by countless anecdotes from tourism operators, and recent spending analysis from Union Pay which points to a healthy rise of independent Chinese travel abroad.