MADRID — Days before flying home to Shanghai, Ding Qi bought a new Samsonite suitcase at an open-air outlet mall 25 kilometers outside Madrid to haul her purchases home. Las Rozas Village, with its tax-free, discount luxury shops, is known for attracting crowds of foreign tourists, including many Chinese travelers.

But 40-year-old Ding is not your typical lavish spender on a Chinese-run 12-day, 5-country tour. She is part of a new generation of travelers that are turning away from the old model and stepping out on their own — sending Chinese agencies and European businesses scrambling to remain attractive to a lucrative, high-spending group of travelers that has the potential to be a serious boost to tourism.

Last year, around 60 percent of Chinese tourists chose to travel on their own, according to a report by digital travel agency Ctrip and the China Tourism Academy.

Touring Spain last month, Ding joined forces with five friends, who rented a car and booked apartments they found online. “Traveling in a group is stressful and tiring,” she said. Ding added she prefers going at her own pace to following an agency’s tightly packed schedule. In Granada and Seville, the friends extended their stay after they fell in love with the local food.

‘More important than ever.’

As younger Chinese travelers increasingly forgo traditional organized tours, Europe’s tourism industry, which is facing a slowdown in internal tourism revenue, is getting nervous.

In total, only about 10.2 million Chinese visited Europe in 2016, according to data by the European Travel Commission (ETC).

China tops the charts as the biggest source of outbound trips and expenses worldwide. In 2016, Chinese people made 122 million outbound trips and spent €100 billion outside the country’s borders.

But while the Continent is by far the world’s top travel destination, it’s not China’s.

Europe lags behind Asian competitors — Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia and Singapore — in attracting Chinese tourists. With the United States in sixth place, only three EU countries ranked among the top 20: Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany. Remarkably, tourism powerhouses such as France and Spain don’t make the cut, according to Ctrip's ranking.

In total, only about 10.2 million Chinese visited Europe in 2016, according to data by the European Travel Commission (ETC). By contrast, about 18 million British tourists traveled to Spain in the same time period. That year, the number of Chinese tourists choosing Europe grew just 2 percent while the number of trips grew by more than 4 percent, meaning the Continent lost market share against its competitors.

That’s a situation governments and companies in Europe are eager to fix.

In Spain, for example, Turespaña — a public agency in charge of tourism promotion — carried out a social media-based marketing campaign to boost Spain’s attractiveness in China last year. It has also teamed up with Chinese TV shows, invited Asian bloggers to visit the country and boosted cooperation between Chinese industry leaders and Spanish companies.

European tourism would benefit from attracting more Chinese travelers, said Manuel Becerra, who negotiated dozens of commercial agreements with European institutions as a business developer at Haiwan, an online travel agency in Beijing.

Not only do the Chinese spend more money abroad than the average tourist, they also fill European hotels during low seasons — like Chinese New Year, which falls between late January and late February and Chinese National Week in October.

Another bonus: they tend not to book beach holidays, which is “good both for Northern and Southern European countries,” Becerra said. “In the North, because they don’t really have that many sunny beaches; in Spain, because we don’t need any more tourists at the beaches and would rather have them visit our museums and cities.”

Europe needs to find new sources of sustainable tourism growth, the European Travel Commission said in an email. “Although the Chinese market only represents 2 percent of the total international arrivals recorded in Europe,” the ETC said, China is “more important than ever.”

Lost in translation

Some European companies are already betting on Chinese tourism. El Corte Inglés, the leading Spanish department store chain, has hired Mandarin-speaking staff for a few of its commercial centers and has specific marketing strategies targeting Chinese tourists in Spain.

“Many products are cheaper here than in China, and they can enjoy the tax-free refund too,” said Qin Lei, a shop assistant at an El Corte Inglés store in Madrid.

Born in Spain to Chinese parents, Qin was hired to cater to Chinese clients, who come to the store in large numbers to buy perfumes, cosmetics and luxury brand items.

Surveys show that Chinese tourists particularly enjoy shopping and culinary experiences when traveling abroad. That’s certainly the case for 26-year old Ye Qianqing, originally from Guangzhou and now studying in Milan, Italy. She recently traveled alone in Portugal and Spain and spent most of her time eating new foods, using a Chinese app called Qiongyou to look up restaurants.

The Chinese internet ecosystem represents one of the challenges facing European businesses. Mobile internet and e-trade is very popular in the Asian giant, and the leading websites are usually local — not American.

Chinese tourists traveling to Europe are more likely to book their plane ticket with Ctrip, buy a ticket for a performance through Alibaba’s e-trade website Taobao and look for a restaurant using Dianping than they are to use Yelp, TripAdvisor, Booking.com or other major platforms popular among Europeans.

“I definitely use Dianping for eating,” said 28-year-old Jiao Kun, who has lived in France for the past six years and was in Madrid on a short trip. He says he trusts the ratings and tastes of his fellow countrymen. Booking hotels via a Chinese app can be less convenient, though, “because they don’t have enough offers,” he added.

Most European companies lack Mandarin-speaking staff, and a large majority of business-owners don’t even know that such apps exist, making them blind to what’s being said about them and how they rank on Chinese websites, not to mention how to compete.

The challenge for Europe

What Chinese tourists care about most is security, according to a recent Ctrip survey. In that sense, Europe’s falling estimation in the eyes of Chinese travelers is also related to a spate of recent terror attacks in Paris, Brussels and more recently the U.K.

If Europe wants to fully capitalize on the Chinese market, it will have to get smart fast.

Tourists also seek out natural resources like clean air and water — increasingly precious in China’s highly polluted megacities — and are particularly concerned about visa policies. The EU does badly on that score too. Even if the 26 Schengen countries share common tourist visa rules, there can also be country-specific requirements, and the smoothness of the application process depends very much on each country's bureaucracy in China.

Ctrip said an increasing number of Chinese choose travel destinations on the spot, and 60 countries around the world now have a visa-free policy toward China, whereas others like the U.S. allow for a 10-year visitor visa.

As more Chinese tourists make last-minute decisions about where to travel, European countries’ cumbersome procedures are prompting some Chinese tourists to look elsewhere.

If Europe wants to fully capitalize on the Chinese market, it will have to get smart fast.

This article is part of an occasional series: China looks West.