THE CHINESE MARKET - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 233

“We don't subscribe to that for multiple reasons. It's not good for the guides, the drivers
or the tourists,” said David Fundingsland of WildChina.
Instead, the agency selects and trains their own guides and drivers, whom they pay a
high base salary: $90 a day for the guides in a country where the official average daily wage
is $16. Moreover those salaries are supplemented with tips from clients and bonuses based
on feedback from the clients. Kickbacks are not allowed. WildChina also has a “no-shop-
ping” policy. Clients can shop if they want on their downtime without a guide. WildChina
organizes meals at restaurants owned by locals, not chains. Local involvement extends to
regular volunteer projects like building latrines and donating tents to the nomads of Yun-
nan Province.
“When the earthquake hit in Sichuan, we sent tents and equipment to the nomads we
had trained to serve and work in camps and enjoy tourism. They had lost everything,” said
Fundingsland.
Despite the higher costs, WildChina has those profit margins of 20 to 25 percent, far
better than most Chinese government tour operations.
“Our institutional clients—like the Peabody Museum, the University of North Caro-
lina—want us to do the coordination for their work and their pleasure, from the general
to the thematic, and they trust us to provide the logistics for their meetings, equipment for
trekking, as well as the side trips for their enjoyment,” he said.
Zhang knows American tastes. She is married to an American writer and journalist, and
she lived in Los Angeles and Washington with her family of three children for more than
five years. Now, as she ramps up her business, Zhang is attending high-end tourism con-
ferences, speaking on panels and employing a public relations firm in the United States to
get out the word and raise the profile of WildChina.
“If I have enough stickiness to the brand, people will come to our website,” she said.
But her steady focus is on securing rights to launch outbound tours for Chinese trav-
eling overseas—the Holy Grail of the industry that Europeans, Americans, Australians,
Arabs and Africans are all fighting for. One day Zhang lunched with the man she calls
her “patron,” a major official in a government travel agency that acts as the umbrella for
her agency. She will apply for an outbound license through his umbrella agency. “We're
required to have that state license to operate,” she said before running off to meet him,
refusing to say his name.
Nellie Connolly, WildChina's head of marketing, reviews what drives sales for WildCh-
ina on the Internet, word of mouth, awards from magazines like Condé Nast Traveler and
the National Geographic , travel shows, Facebook, Twitter, and the WildChina blog. “We
don't buy advertisements,” she said. “We rely on travel writers.”
After reading those blogs and articles as well as the awards citations, I saw that while
WildChina is challenging the government business model, it is staying very much within
the political limits set by government officials. The extreme example is Tibet. WildChina