Many will spend big in Russia; trip ‘last chance’ to see favorites play
Chinese soccer fans' passion for visiting Russia is rising ahead of the 2018 World Cup, which will be held in several Russian cities from mid-June to mid-July.
Zhu Xuguang, a Beijinger who is also a veteran soccer fan, will spend about two weeks and thousands of dollars in Russia during the event to watch all the matches played by the Spanish squad.
Zhu in the past has attended Copa América and UEFA Champions League, two international soccer matches, but he has never watched World Cup matches on the scene. "I've been a soccer fan for years, and many football stars who I am familiar with are getting old and retiring. This World Cup might be the last chance I get to see many of them playing," he told the Global Times on Wednesday.
Another soccer fan from Suzhou, East China's Jiangsu Province surnamed Xu, shared this sentiment. She hopes to watch what might be the "last hurrah" of her favorite soccer star Lionel Messi, she told the Global Times on Wednesday night.
Xu also plans to do some sightseeing and shopping in Moscow and St Petersburg after the matches. "I've checked out several famed shopping destinations in those two cities," she said. She's hoping to buy handbags and makeup.
Many Chinese soccer fans are planning on visiting Russia during the World Cup. Data sent by Shanghai-based tourism company Lvmama to the Global Times showed that bookings for tours to Russia during the first seven months of 2018 were almost double the year-earlier level, setting a record.
The Global Times also checked the website of domestic sports match ticket seller wandasportstravel.com. As of Thursday, tickets for about half of the Russia World Cup matches had been sold out.
"Compared with past World Cups, this time the number of Chinese viewers is sure to surge, as Chinese fans have more desire to watch on-site matches. Starting from the Brazil World Cup in 2014, they realized that watching World Cup matches on-the-spot is not that difficult to achieve," Zhu said.
Also, according to Zhu, some "fixtures" of previous World Cup matches, like the Italian and US squads, have been knocked out, so soccer fans in those countries won't be too eager to go to Russia to watch the cup. "They will be replaced by many Chinese fans instead," Zhu said.
Increasingly affluent Chinese tourists are willing to splash out on the event. Zhu said that he's going to spend about $7,700 on the trip, with about $2,700 going on tickets and the rest on airfares, hotels and meals.
He was lucky enough to win a lottery that allowed him to buy tickets on the FIFA official website at relatively low prices, but on other channels ticket prices are soaring.
On wandasportstravel.com, for example, the ticket for the final game in Moscow costs about 47,000 yuan ($7,336).
Data provided by domestic travel service provider Ctrip also showed that average personal cost for World Cup tourism (including match tickets and other costs) has reached about 50,000 yuan in Ctrip's offline orders. The biggest order came from a fan in Xiamen, East China's Fujian Province, who has spent 850,000 yuan for the occasion.
Song Kui, president of the Contemporary China-Russia Regional Economy Research Institute in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, said that tourism between Russia and China has become an integral part of the two countries' economic interaction.
"Bilateral tourism cooperation has expanded from simple visits to deeper tourism industry cooperation like tourism insurance, expos, education and investment," Song told the Global Times on Thursday.
