The most popular destinations for foreign tourists were Guangdong Province (7.33 million visits) and Shanghai (5.93 million visits). These figures were no doubt boosted by the Asian Games in Guangzhou and the Shanghai Expo. Beijing was the fifth most popular province/municipality (4.22 milion visits).

The news of China’s bronze-medal winning performance led to a whole lot of positive hyperbole about the Chinese tourism industry. According to Xinhua, The United Nations World Tourism Organisation even revised their previous forecast of China being the world’s number one tourist destination by 2020, to say China could overtake France by 2015.

There are a number of agencies that offer this service. But I should start off by saying that there are a number of issues that make things a bit difficult for those travelers who like to have their train transport organized in advance. The first is that train tickets only go on sale five or ten days in advance (20 days for Z trains).

These restrictions apply to agencies as well as individuals. So even if you put in your order online two months in advance, the ticket might not actually be able to be bought (and therefore confirmed) until your vacation has well and truly begun. This lack of confirmation can be frustrating for people who like to have things well organised.

Secondly, you can never be absolutely sure your tickets will come through. During Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), and sometimes also the other major holidays, agencies will not accept train ticket bookings as tickets are very hard to come by and they can't promise to purchase them with any reasonable degree of certainty.

Thirdly, tickets can be bought only in the city where your journey starts (meaning you can't buy a ticket in Shanghai for a train from Beijing to Xian). So your agent will need to have a representative in all the cities you are traveling from to be able to purchase your tickets.

All that said, booking online can still be worthwhile. If it's not going to stress you out waiting for a confirmation and you're happy to resort to a Plan B on the off-chance that the booking is possible, then booking train tickets online saves you the hassle of organizing tickets while you're travelling. The mark-ups the agencies charge are fairly reasonable – generally around ¥150 per ticket, including delivery to your hotel. In contrast, if you book through your hotel or hostel, they might charge anywhere from ¥30-¥150.

As for which agencies you should use, there are plenty out there (as you will see if you Google for it). I'm only listing two here because I have first-hand experience seeing how both these agencies work and I can vouch for their professionalism and service. No doubt the others are fine too, though.

China Business World

Their website is a bit tricky to navigate but their service is good.

China Trip Advisor

Another good agency to use.

My guess is that it probably won’t be. And it almost certainly won’t be possible to pay with a foreign credit card online given that even major travel providers targeting foreign tourists such as CTrip and Elong require a faxed credit card authorisation form. But it’s good news nonetheless. Anything that helps to shorten the often horrendous queues at train stations in China has to be a good thing.

Recent test runs on the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway line have broken records, reaching speeds of 486 km/h. When it’s up and running, trains will run at an average speed of 380 km/h and shorten the journey between the two cities from 10 hours to about 4 hours. When the service is launched, you would have to think it will be more convenient to travel between the two cities by train than by air.

In other train travel news, it looks like a program that requires ID to be shown when buying tickets will be extended. The program is aimed to cut down on ticket scalping by linking each ticket to a specific individual. A similar system operates in Russia, and while it creates some hassle with the extra checks, it should do a lot to improve ticket availability on Chinese railways.

Hangzhou is only the third city in China to run ads on foreign television (after Beijing and Shanghai) and the Hangzhou Tourism Commission is apparently pushing to put Hangzhou in the same league. They figure that at the moment not many people in the West have really heard of Hangzhou and the idea of this campaign is to change that.

Hangzhou is a nice city. But I’ve always looked at it more as a place an expat might go for a weekend break from Shanghai. I don’t see it being a worthwhile inclusion on a first-trip itinerary for any tourist. Even as a second-tier tourist city, I could list a number of other destinations that I’d place before it. West Lake is lovely, it’s a relatively peaceful and pretty city, but there is nothing really special about Hangzhou. It’s an “if you have time” destination.

But others disagree with me: Hangzhou made the New York Times’ list of “41 Places to Go in 2011″. Would it be cynical to think it’s inclusion on that list might be somehow related to this advertising campaign? Anyway, maybe this advertising campaign will convince people: it’s costing them US$3 million after all. And while I think there are far more interesting places in China, I can’t imagine any tourist being disappointed in Hangzhou either.