WEST YELLOWSTONE — The haunting cowboy movie theme from Clint Eastwood’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” drifts out to the street from Yellowstone Big Gun Fun, the indoor shooting range that’s a big hit with tourists, especially a growing number of tourists from China.
The thrill of shooting real handguns, rifles and machine guns attracts Chinese visitors by the busload — often 20 to 30 tour buses a day, says co-owner Eric Yarger.
Shooting firearms — at a cost of $25 to $350 — is something they can’t do legally in China.
Chinese tourists make up about 80 percent of the range’s summer business. A sign out front shows an AK-47, and below is a sign in Chinese characters, which has been translated as “Soldier brothers shooting range. You can do it yourself, now here.” The range’s website also offers a price list in Chinese characters.
It’s not unusual for Chinese customers “to shoot every gun we have,” Yarger said. “They can spend over $1,000.”
Behind the counter, Jerry Liang, a university student from Hebing, is one of 11 Chinese-speaking assistants hired this year on work visas. Liang waits for after-dinner customers, ready to set them up with headphones and goggles and to explain “how to play the gun … safer.”
Chinese visitors come often on big tour buses, yet these aren’t your retirees from Ohio traveling on a budget. Often they’re millionaires, Yarger said. Some have paid cash from wads of $100 bills.
Big Gun Fun — West Yellowstone’s No. 2 most popular attraction on TripAdvisor.com — is just one of the most visible and colorful examples of the growing trend of Chinese tourists traveling to the Yellowstone area.
In America, after New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, one of the big bucket-list destinations is Yellowstone National Park.
Walking by West Yellowstone’s Dairy Queen, Xuequian Kong, 33, a chemistry professor from Hangzhou, said that he and his group came for three days.
“Because it’s a famous place,” Kong said. “People all around the world know Yellowstone. Many people in China like to come here if they get the chance…. Yellowstone is well-managed. It keeps its original, natural ecosystem.”
The influx of Chinese visitors to this country has grown five-fold since 2007, from 400,000 to 2.1 million travelers last year, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Travel and Tourism Office.
The trend is fueled by China’s rising middle class and millionaire class, by a pent-up desire to see the world, and by the loosening of government visa rules.
In the past seven years, spending by U.S. visitors from China grew from $4 billion to $21 billion.
By 2019 China is projected to surpass every country sending tourists to the U.S., except the two biggest, Canada and Mexico. By 2020, says the National Travel office, the number of Chinese travelers here will double to 5.7 million.
Yarger and his wife, Beverly, opened the shooting range four years ago, largely because they saw the wave coming. Similar shooting ranges have been popular in places like Hawaii.
Asked if the recent devaluation of the Chinese yuan and drop in China’s stock market hurt business, Yarger said there has been a little downturn.
“But you have to understand, the Chinese who come are usually very wealthy,” Yarger said. “One told me he lost $100,000. He didn’t seem worried.”
Yarger said the scenic beauty of Yellowstone is a big attraction.
“They don’t see blue sky,” he said. “They’re lucky if they see a dog, let alone wild animals.”
West Yellowstone should do more to provide motel rooms, restrooms, garbage and other services, Yarger argued, because a lot more people are coming.
“Hold onto your hat,” he said.
In June, Bozeman’s Super 8 motel put up the first local billboards in Mandarin at Gallatin Gateway and Pray, to catch the eye of Chinese travelers driving out of Yellowstone National Park.
The phone number on the billboards rings a special line marked China, said Super 8 general manager Matt Sease.
The motel hired a Chinese graduate student last year to help with marketing, especially with ads on China’s Facebook, and when that phone line lights up, she answers customers’ questions.
This year, Chinese travelers made up 7 to 8 percent of Super 8’s business, Sease said.
The market is evolving. Instead of seeing lots of tour buses, as in the last few years, now he’s seeing more Chinese individuals and families traveling with mothers, fathers and grandparents. They fly into Seattle, Salt Lake City or Minneapolis and drive here. Increasingly they fly into Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport.
“Occupancy has been sky-high this year in Bozeman” in general, Sease said. That’s not only because of Chinese travelers, but they’re playing a role.
At the Days Inn in Bozeman, tour groups are driving in from Canada, “all speaking Asian,” said Victoria Short, front desk clerk. Tour groups sometimes occupy up to half the motel’s 113 rooms.
“It feels good when we have a lobby full,” Short said. “They’re very pleasant and loving Montana. They buy more postcards than anybody else. The children speak very good English.”
Often the guests walk across North Seventh Avenue to eat at Famous Dave’s or Applebee’s, lacking the transportation to check out downtown Bozeman eateries.
Daryl Schliem, Bozeman Area Chamber of Commerce president and CEO, said the chamber has been working to increase tourism to Bozeman overall, now up to 4.2 million people a year. He doubted most Bozeman residents are aware of the growth of visitors from China.
Changing the airport’s name from Gallatin Field to “Bozeman Yellowstone International” will have an impact, he said.
A lot of the bus tours go from Yellowstone or Billings and then up to Glacier National Park, Schliem said.
“Sometimes they save a lifetime to come here,” he said. “So they spend up to 10 times what we spend.”
Chinese visitors are having a significant impact on the town’s strengthening economy, said Jan Stoddard, marketing director for the West Yellowstone Tourist Business Improvement District and board president of the West Yellowstone Chamber of Commerce.
Resort tax collections from the town’s sales tax have been growing steadily the last three years — last year by 11.5 percent. This July’s collection set a new record.
Yet the Chinese market has been hard on a lot of retailers, Stoddard said.
If a Chinese tour leader walked into a shop, turned over a souvenir and found “made in China,” she said, “Everybody would leave. They’re looking for American or Native American or really unique” souvenirs.
Chinese tourists really like high-end clothing and jewelry, Stoddard said, “things you find in Rodeo Drive, not West Yellowstone.”
“They will buy magnets, Native American jewelry, bison jerky — not T-shirts,” she said. “For our community, it’s a real learning experience.”
The reason Chinese tourists are coming to West Yellowstone goes back to 1996, when the first “Fam Tour” or familiarization tour, was hosted by the town and Montana Office of Tourism, Stoddard said. That brought in Chinese business leaders, who talked up the beauty of Yellowstone back home.
Then Chinese government travel agencies got involved. What really hit West Yellowstone two years ago was the change of visa rules, now “wide open for leisure travelers,” she said.
In the past, visiting the U.S. was a one-time experience for Chinese travelers. Now visa holders can visit as many times as they like over 10 years. Suddenly there was an influx of people on big tours. Now people are coming back as families.
Stoddard and her husband operate the Kirkwood Resort and Marina on Hebgen Lake, which rents out 11 cabins. About half their customers are independent Chinese travelers; the rest are hunters and fishermen.
Chinese travelers behave in ways that may seem off-putting to Americans, but actually are just cultural differences, Stoddard said. Americans line up at the front desk, Chinese tend to flock en masse at the desk.
If Chinese patrons talk louder in restaurants than Americans, as one culture guide pointed out, it may be because they come from cities with millions of people.
“You’ve got to realize they’re not being rude to you,” she said, they’re just following their own cultural norms.
The Chinese are highly adept at using technology and smartphones, she said. Translation apps, like WeChat, are a big help when she’s giving directions or settling credit card transactions. She said the Park Service now has a ranger at Old Faithful who speaks Mandarin.
Another cultural difference is food. West Yellowstone once had just one Chinese restaurant; today it has three. (The West Yellowstone News reported last month that the owner of the Red Lotus Restaurant was recently fined for illegally buying meat and gall bladders from two black bears, four pheasant and nearly a dozen wild trout.)
West Yellowstone’s former KFC is now Chopstix Pho Noodles. Even some pizza restaurants have posted menus in Chinese at the door.
LingTao Zhang opened Tao’s Inn last year, and added a sushi bar and teahouse. He plans to double the inn’s eight rooms in coming weeks and hopes to keep expanding.
The 40-year-old entrepreneur from China came to the U.S. 17 years ago to study computer science, and switched to acupuncture and business. Zhang spent summers working in West Yellowstone’s Chinese restaurant to earn tuition money. He was planning to return to China, but decided it would be “such a pity” to waste all the skills he’d learned here.
“I like it here in West Yellowstone,” Zhang said. “It’s more like a village.… Everybody knows everybody, everybody is so friendly. They don’t avoid eye contact. My hometown has 14 million people.”
Zhang said he expects Chinese visitation to continue, but “I don’t think the Chinese will keep coming forever.” After all, Japanese and German tourists were once very big in the 1980s.
Eventually there will be a Chinese version of Lonely Planet guides, Zhang said. More people will plan their own trips instead of taking big tours. Once they have options, he said, their destinations will likely be more diversified.
Haybina Hao, director of international development for the National Tour Association based in Kentucky, is a national expert on the Chinese tourist market. Beijing-born Hao has spoken in Montana twice to update the tourism industry on the potential of China.
Hao said she thinks the Yellowstone Park area will be “very strong … for quite some time” for both Chinese tour groups and individual travelers.
“People are looking for something very unique,” Hao said. “Yellowstone itself is such a beautiful place. … They all want to see Yellowstone Park.
“It has become a joy for them to explore the U.S.,” she said. One reason: “Chinese love to drive,” she said. Unlike China, in America there are roads everywhere, gas stations everywhere, motels everywhere.
“Here they can have a driving thrill,” she said. “They can speed.”
In the end, travel will have a bigger impact on people than just economic, Hao said. “Through all this travel, we help understand each other better.”