Introducing Chinese Students to Finnish Universities with Tourism Purpose

Abstract

Tourism is an important section of the global market. Nowadays Finland is becoming a pop- ular tourist destination towards Chinese people, who are drastically growing into one of the world largest tourism consumer groups. Finland is well known for its outstanding quality of education and natural attractions. A start-up travel agency sees this trend as an opportunity, and is planning to arrange a Finnish study tour for Chinese university students, offering them opportunities to broaden their views and experience culture exchange. The purpose of the thesis is to conduct market research on tourism and education in both Finland and China. Author first paint a general picture of China’s outbound tourism including the trend, sustainability and customer behaviour in the aspect of study tours. In addition, author also explores the background information on the Finnish education and tourism. At last, the au- thor conducts a survey towards potential customers in order to provide the case agency with resourceful data and recommendation for organizing the study tour. Data from survey was collected through questionnaire. A quantitative data collecting method is involved in the questionnaire. 193 Chinese bachelor students from Northern China were treated as potential customers in the survey. The results indicate that there is a high de- mand for a study tour in Finland among the targeted Chinese students, but many factors such as culture differences, timing and budget appear to be potential threads that hinders some of them from joining the study tour. As a conclusion, the data and information collected from the research suggests that it is feasible to introduce Chinese student to Finland through study tour, however the company must be taken into consideration when planning the tour according to customers’ prefer- ences.