As identified earlier in this piece, another important affect of the law is that travel agents are not allowed to designate specific shopping places to their clients. As a result, travellers need to identify stores themselves. Those retailers who used to cooperate with Chinese travel agents and benefited from the travellers taken by tour guides may suffer the most. However, many retailers may benefit, particularly from those tourists that were taken by a tour guide in the past, may come back to the same store again. Those on tours which now have ‘free time’ that once was a shopping trip, are quite likely to choose to go shopping anyway during this time, as it would be an easy choice. …

The full article content is only available to Luxury Insights China subscribers.