Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the tourism industry in China: its tremendous opportunities, the extraordinary role of gov-
ernment and the industry's problems.
A native of the town of Dali in Yunnan Province, Zhang attended college at Kunming,
the capital of Yunnan, and then Harvard, where she earned a master's degree in business
administration. She was unhappy at her first job in banking.
“So I took a sabbatical and traveled around the world: Northern Europe, Scandinavia,
Switzerland, and South Africa,” she said. “I went to Tibet and Nepal in the Himalayas,
which was probably the peak of my life.”
She ended up in her home province where, she said, she was struck by its stunning
scenery and its potential for tourism. “After I had seen the rest of the world, I realized how
beautiful Yunnan was and how great it would be for tourism.”
Impressed by the possibilities, Zhang resigned from her job, and in 2000, at the age of
thirty, she started her own luxury tourism agency called WildChina from a small office in
Beijing. “All of a sudden I became this take-charge entrepreneur. From there the snowball
started rolling.”
Today she is a well-spoken, handsome woman who runs a company of fifty employees
from her office in the diplomatic section of Beijing. Zhang said WildChina has a 25 per-
cent profit margin, but she is anxious to “jump into the next class and grow the busi-
ness.” With her solid base in the United States, she is broadening to include countries
throughout the Asia-Pacific region and Europe. Recently she added French and Spanish
translations to her website.
Her top goal is to win official approval to operate tours in the United States for Chinese
travelers. She sees the same pot of gold that Albar at Marriott sees: the money that can be
made as millions of Chinese tourists travel for the first time.
I spent three days shadowing Zhang Mei as she plotted her next move while keeping an
eye on her tour company. Zhang said WildChina's popularity requires that she stay one
step ahead of what until now has been pretty lousy competition. She is constantly reima-
gining tours, adding restaurants and fanciful twists on iconic visits. For a famous movie-star
client, she turned a visit to the Great Wall into a sunset dinner party, serving supper on
white tablecloths with the sun disappearing over the hills. “It is a way of seeing the familiar
from a different angle—a wild moment,” Zhang said.
The three Washington-area couples I met taking lessons in tai chi were her clients.
Their three-week tour took them eventually to Shangri-La in the mountain valleys of Yun-
nan Province bordering Tibet. They went from the plush comforts of Shanghai to the
austere beauty of snowcapped mountains, Buddhist monasteries and no heat or indoor
plumbing. They told me they felt as if they had gone from modern to medieval times, the
reaction that Zhang cultivates to show old and new China.
So far, Zhang has been lucky that her competition is largely from the Chinese govern-
ment. Most of the thousands of Chinese tour agencies that appear to be independent are
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