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GUANGZHOU: Chen Meiying wanted to book a special tour package for her parents as a Mothers' Day treat last month, but finding a travel agent willing to provide services for elderly people proved more difficult than she expected.

"Few travel agencies here provide specialized services for older people. I finally had to arrange for my parents to travel with a large tour group with a lot of young people," said Chen, an employee of a Guangzhou-based accounting company.

Chen's story is not unique. Confronted with the comparatively higher costs of arranging tour packages for elderly people, many travel agencies in Guangzhou are simply dropping such services.

"Many travel agencies consider the cost of arranging trips for seniors to be too high. For example, elderly people are vulnerable to illness," said Tan Aiying, director of the Guangzhou Tour Association.

At present, few travel agencies have any sort of measures in place to cope with illnesses among their customers.

"If (travel agents) were to hire doctors or train their tour guides to give them basic medical knowledge, then their overhead would definitely increase," said Tan.

She added that older people tend to spend less on holiday than younger tourists, making them a less attractive type of customer.

"Most travel agencies benefit less from organizing tour groups for the aged because they are not willing to buy anything during the tours," Tan said.

However, not all companies have shunned the aged. Representatives of the Guangzhou-based Hualingmei Senior Citizens International Travel Co Ltd, which has been in business for more than 20 years, said they were confident that the market for tour services for the elderly was strong.

Hualingmei's tour packages are all to domestic destinations, like Hangzhou in East China and Harbin in Northeast China.

"After more than two decades in business, we see a promising market for the aged thanks to improvements in living standards. More than 95 percent of our customers are elderly people," the company's market manager, Wang Ting, said in an interview with China Daily.

Wang said the company's revenue in April had increased by 80 percent compared with the same period of last year.

Wang attributed the growth to "improved services" specially designed for old people.

Wang added that tour packages designed for older people had different routes and departure times than those targeting young tourists.

(China Daily 06/05/2007 page5)