Asians Get Going; Newly rich and mobile, travelers are pouring out of China and India. They're sticking close to home for now, but it's only a matter of time before they fan out across the globe, reshaping the tourist landscape.

Byline: George Wehrfritz, With Alexandra A. Seno in Hong Kong, Sudip Mazumdar in New Delhi, Mark Russell in Seoul and Hideko Takayama in Tokyo

Zhe Lijuan has grown fat on Chinese dumplings--so much so that she recently opted to spend a bit of the proceeds from her successful Shanghai restaurant on a short overseas holiday. Her destination: the former British colony Hong Kong, where she took in the port city's glittering sights and purchased a $300 platinum bracelet. One highlight of her first foray out of the mainland was the 3-D Gold Tourism Exhibition Hall and its main attraction: a $7.7 million toilet. Members of her group paid $3 each for a turn to have their pictures taken atop the golden throne. "This place is very deluxe!" Zhe gushed.

Zhe and her cohorts represent the new face of tourism, both in Asia and around the globe. In Europe and America, overseas holidays have long been a middle-class habit, but travel is only now becoming a mass-market enterprise in Asia. To be sure, the Japanese have been at it for a generation already, followed in the 1990s by footloose Taiwanese, South Koreans and Chinese from Hong Kong and Singapore. Still, their numbers pale when compared with the hordes of new travelers now flooding out from the region's two emerging giants: China and India. "China alone is rewriting the rulebook," says John Koldowski, managing director of the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) in Bangkok. "Japan took three decades to reach 17 million outbound trips annually; China did it in just five years."

Asia is scrambling to accommodate these newbie travelers. With smaller budgets, shorter time frames and a penchant for group tours, they're thoroughly unlike the more worldly visitors they're rapidly supplanting. In Hong Kong, for example, a surge in tourists from the mainland has necessitated a shift in hotel construction from five-star luxury accommodations to three-star tourist hotels; hundreds of electronics shops that once lured Japanese big spenders with high-end gadgets are stocking up on cheaper fare--digital cameras and the like. Singapore has offered multiple-entry visas to attract Indians on holiday; regionwide, the change bodes well for efforts to allow Chinese and Indian visitors visas to enter individually as well as on group tours. The trend should fuel the rise of budget airlines in the region.

The tourism industry has reacted to the twin phenomena of travel booms in China and India by fundamentally re-examining itself. The old dichotomy between domestic and international travel has blurred in favor of a new concept called "total tourism." It lumps all travel into one global category in which borders increasingly don't matter. Today's domestic tourist, goes the logic, will become tomorrow's globe-trotter, who will return with more worldly tastes and create pressure to transform and modernize the travel industry back home.

India exemplifies the cycle's origin in the rise of domestic tourism. Middle-class families, many traveling for the first time, have clogged the dewy mountain trails of Ooty, flocked to religious centers like Rishikesh and beset scores of beaches, nature reserves and palaces across the Subcontinent. Some 300 million Indians took trips within the country in 2003, spending nearly $9.2 billion according to the latest official tally, compared with $6.2 billion in 2002. Ravi Bhoothalingam, a tourism ...