The Chinese are coming, the Chinese are coming. At least that’s what the world’s travel operators, hotel companies and airlines are all assuming, and are in fact counting on to drive demand.

International tourist arrivals, a measure of actual bodies on the move, have jumped 30 per cent since 2003, to nearly 900m in 2007, according to the UN World Tourism Organisation. Now the internet, low-cost airlines and rising Asian wealth are predicted to send the numbers really skyward. The UNWTO forecasts annual tourist arrivals will reach 1.6bn tourists by 2020, including 166m travellers from Asia and the Pacific alone. These numbers are reasonably conservative: the forecast of 100m Chinese tourists, for example, suggests that just 7 per cent of the country’s population will be travelling abroad, up from 3 per cent now. What if the actual percentage was 10?