Travel China Planner

Two leading research and consulting organizations for the Chinese tourism market, China Outbound Tourism Research Institute and Dragon Trail, signed a partnership agreement during China International Travel Mart held in Kunming.

The two parties will cooperate on comprehensive research, social media and other digital marketing activities for the Chinese tourism market. Germany-based COTRI focuses on analysis and consulting relating to the Chinese outbound tourism market. Dragon Trail is a professional digital marketing and social media service provider focusing on China’s outbound tourism and domestic markets. Dragon Tail has offices in China and Canada.

Wolfgang Georg Arlt, the founder and director of COTRI, commented that product adaptation, training programs, and social marketing are all necessary parts for successful cross-culture tourism offerings. He added that COTRI and Dragon Trail would provide the tourism industry both inside and outside China with a strong source for all services needed to develop the fast growing and segmenting Chinese tourism market. By combining the advantages of the two companies, they can provide a competitive edge to travel brands entering the Chinese market, in addition to working with travel agencies and tour operators in China.

Kunming Tourism Administration has published a list of irregular operations and the resulting tourism complaints that occurred from May 1 to August 31, 2009. A total of eight travel agencies were punished for irregularities.

Four of the eight agencies — Yunnan International Travel Service, Yunnan Zhongqing International Travel Service, Kunming Fengqing International Travel (Group) Company, and Yunnan Travel Business International Travel Service — were punished for using illegal vehicles for tour groups in Kunming.

Kunming Comfort Travel Service was punished for setting up outlets without the approval of the tourism administrative department; Kunming Youth Travel Service was punished for selling travel products at below-cost prices; Kunming Boda Travel Service was punished for not signing contracts with tourists; and Kunming Hongyan Travel Service was punished for not providing information about tour groups to tourism administrative departments and tourism supervision organs.

China Eastern Airlines’ Yunnan branch is reported to be planning to launch its second international route to the South Asian subcontinent, the Kunming-Katmandu, Nepal direct flight on July 17, 2009.

The flight is scheduled to take off every Tuesday, Friday and Sunday and will be operated using Boeing 737 aircraft. This is also the third international direct flight departing from Kunming launched by China Eastern’s Yunnan branch in 2009, following the Kunming-Siem Reap, Cambodia and Kunming-Phuket, Thailand flights.

To date, the Yunnan branch of China Eastern has flights to Osaka, Singapore, Phuket, Siem Reap, Vientiane, Phnom Penh, Dacca and Calcutta. This new flight will further expand the international flight network of Yunnan branch covering East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia.

We arrived at the school and immediately had a test. The yunnan tour we book in Beijing is a Chinese agent. There are few Yunnan Travel Agents we can find. This test was either right or wrong, bearing in mind that most of it was in Hanzi characters. Travel yunnan in China is not difficult as u may think. As some of the test was about filling gaps and I couldn’t fill them because I didn’t know all of the characters (which can take years to learn)

I wrote the translations alongside the characters that I knew. This showed that although I did not know the answer to the gaps, I did know some characters and some meaning. A bit like a maths test with the working out shown but it was wrong because I didn’t fill the gaps. In my mind, this showed the teacher that I did know something though not the thing she needed – this doesn’t mean that I know nothing. Chris did better at the test but the lesson became interesting when the test was cast aside and we were asked to open the text and exercise books provided by the teacher.

The first lesson was how to say hello. We did this same lesson one year ago with our English instructor, Ping, at Sheffield College and we’ve come a long way since then. Chris has additionally put in up to 5 hours a day (mostly every day) extra personal study, I put in between 1 and 2, so, when the teacher asked us to read and repeat for the fourth time; “hello, what is your name”, Chris couldn’t bear it and the open discussion began about how our abilities had not been taken into consideration, what we needed to learn, how we could learn it and a way forward which resulted in the teacher being very defensive about previous students thinking that they know it all, raising her voice and Chris needing to leave the room to walk out and calm down. Course, it’s usually me raising my voice and I agreed with everything Chris had said so when he had gone walk about, a secondary conversation began between myself and the teacher about how we need to be stimulated and challenged. Her answer was that maybe she should she speak entirely in Chinese to us then? And I answered that this was not teaching. I feel that being taught is about being stimulated, challenged, understood and encouraged and not starting backwards. The way here seems to be to stick to the book, right from the beginning whatever level you are at. BUT as we have travelled 14,000 miles to this learning centre in the South of China and Chris has done solid 12 hour shifts to save money to come and I took 2 jobs, as well as learning additionally to our college course, then we feel that we have a right to say that the level of teaching is below our standard and that sticking to a book learning every detail about how to say hello perfectly will only teach us a small amount of information perfectly when we need to learn about survival – how to order food, what happens if we are ill – how to communicate that we need help, we need correcting on how we would buy tickets for travel and so on. The communication between both parties is key and if we cannot learn more in these 3 weeks than we already know then it is a waste of very valuable time and money.

In the end, we left after 2 hours and have agreed that we go back tomorrow and find a balanced way forward. Yunnan tours on website are not easy to find. She still wants us to either do all the exercises as home work or bring our own books into her school but we can do this ourselves – we need to be able to communicate in a real manner.

After we left school, it was really raining, my credit card had been stopped by the bank because they think it is being used by someone else (even though I had logged that I am in China) and we had no idea what to do next about the school but in a way, before the yunnan travel is finished. I felt we had won a small battle (but not the war) because we have the choice to go where we want, get the best out of the learning facilities available that there is to offer and the freedom to move around.

Our journey started normally but five hours into it, we were stopped behind a traffic jam. Our yunnan tour booked when we were in chengdu provided by a local agent. We could see traffic also tailing back curling around the mountain in the opposite direction so the problem was somewhere in between. Everyone got off the bus and started walking forwards to see what the problem was. Travel yunna is not difficult but I couldn’t believe my eyes. A flat back lorry that originally had two huge rocks on, had lost its load whilst struggling up the mountain road. One of the great rocks had slid off completely, the other was resting on it and had tilted the lorry – rising the cab to a sharp 45 degree angle. The accident had caused a tail back on either side of hundreds of vehicles, some of which beeped their horns and squeezed past in between the tiny gap of the fallen rock and mountain side wall.

I’d read about landslides on these mountain roads and that people eventually walk as it takes days to remove the rocks. This problem was different but had no solution. Hundreds of people gathered around the lorry and the rocks but no one knew what was going to happen. Men smoked and rolled their tee shirts up over their stomachs, kids ran around and women squatted aroung the edge. The police arrived but did nothing. About an hour later a digger arrived and tried to shunt the enormous rocks and I couldn’t believe that people were standing either side of it. As the rocks were shuffled, the lorry remained at its sharp angle. The whole place seemed to have turned into a circus.

The digger toiled away for over an hour until eventually, it moved the rocks and the lorry bounced back to earth, the driver got in, moved it and parked it up near his expensive lost load. It was just getting dark and we had been held up for about 3 hours. Somehow our bus had managed to wangle its way to the front of our queue and was the first to pass the lost load. I counted (sad – I know ) 145 parked vehicles in the queue behind the rocks and there were as many as that behind us. It’s odd but when I came to China 2 years ago, I used to talk English to everyone even though they didn’t understand and I got by. Now that I can speak a little Mandarin (very badly) and still cannot be understood, I now say very little because I make such a mess of it and it renders me speechless. It’s true that we could not understand a word of what people were saying and that they could not understand us which left us completely in the dark and in quite a vulnerable position. When the bus stopped on the journey,

we didn’t understand why and for how long and when we neared places, we had no idea where we were. Our trust was completely in the two bus drivers and following people when the bus stopped. It says in the book that this route separates the traveller from the tourist. In the end, we reached Lijiang 6 hours late, caught a taxi to the language school where we will be learning Mandarin for the next three weeks, just in time to see our host leaving with her friend for dinner. She brought us to our hostel which is in the same residential area to the learning school and I asked where the shared accommodation with kitchen was and Chris just declared, ‘Where’s the double bed?’

The next day we walked into Lijiang old town to look at an alternative hostel where there would be more life. On arrival into yunnan, our guide told us the yunnan tour is the best served by a local agent and it’s true after all of this. Yunnan travel is different from other tours in Beijing, shanghai. We looked around 4 and finally settled on the Chinese International Youth Hostel.