The Charles Hotel Accommodates Growing Chinese Market

In response to an influx of tourists from China, Harvard Square’s The Charles Hotel is making an effort to increase its knowledge of Chinese customs to better cater to the expanding clientele.

In the past two years, the number of Chinese guests at The Charles Hotel has doubled, general manager Alex Attia estimated. Now, the hotel greets those guests with a Chinese website, a staff member fluent in Mandarin or Cantonese on duty at all times, and a pair of slippers in each room.

The New York Times reported last week that The Preferred Hotel Group, which includes The Charles, plans to launch a targeted marketing program called China Ready next month.

The Charles Hotel, for its part, has already taken strides to welcome the wave of travelers from China.

“From our standpoint, we really focus on the fact that in the Chinese culture, the hierarchy is still very important,” Attia said. “When we get the information on the traveler, we want to make sure we know who is the senior person and who is the junior person and make sure that we have the senior person on the highest floor, and so on.”

The Charles offers a discounted rate to guests visiting Harvard’s campus, and the university is a major draw for Chinese visitors to Cambridge. Attia said that the hotel conducted research in preparation for the new program that found Harvard to be the number one brand in China, just ahead of Coca-Cola.

“From our perspective, we know there are more Chinese visitors to Harvard the last couple of years, and we are lucky to be on the grounds,” Attia said.

The Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism reported that the number of Chinese visitors to Massachusetts rose by 7.9 percent from 2011 to 2012, and that 10 percent of all Chinese tourists visiting the United States in 2012 came to Massachusetts.

For Attia, the nationwide efforts to welcome tourists from China are just the latest development in the hotel industry. Attia said he watched as the hotel business accommodated a similar surge in travelers from Japan in the mid-1980s, followed by a response to the growth of the Brazilian market in the early 1990s.

“This is our business’ reaction to the new traveler,” Attia said. “For us now, it is the Chinese market, and we’re trying to make it as easy and comfortable for the traveler to spend their time in our neighborhood.”

—Staff writer Nikki D. Erlick can be reached at nikki.erlick@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @nikkierlick.