CHINA’S Jin Jiang International is looking to buy hotels in major European cities, including Paris, to expand its luxury portfolio, the CEO of its Louvre Hotels Pierre-Frederic Roulot said yesterday.

    Roulot, who oversees Jin Jiang’s expansion in Europe, said the close ties with China enjoyed by Louvre Hotels had helped it weather an overall decline in Chinese visitors to France in 2016 due to security fears.

    Jin Jiang’s strength as a powerful tour operator is also helping when foreign tourists, notably from China, have avoided France after a wave of militant attacks and repeated robberies against Asian tourists, Roulot said.

    “There were 2.2 million Chinese visitors in France in 2015, this could fall to 1.8 million this year but we are seeing a rise of between 8 percent and 10 percent in nightly Chinese stays...We are less impacted than others,” he said.

    China has been the world’s largest outbound tourism market since 2012, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), with spending on travel abroad growing double digits in the first nine months of 2016.

    Louvre Hotels, which is the second-largest budget hotel in Europe after France’s AccorHotels, will also use its alliance with China’s biggest bank card provider UnionPay to reach more of the growing number of Chinese travellers abroad.

    Its hotels in France will now accept China UnionPay credit cards, further boosting its profile and responding to concerns many Chinese tourists have about not carrying too much cash in French streets due to safety fears.

    Jin Jiang, one of China’s biggest hotel groups, bought Louvre Hotels in 2015 for 1.3 billion euros (US$1.4 billion) as an “expansion platform” outside China, Roulot said, although he declined to comment on its push to raise its 12.6 percent stake in France’s AccorHotels. (SD-Agencies)