We Live to Create Life-Changing Experiences. But Why? and How?

Preparing sour tea with ancestors of the first tea cultivators. Xishuangbanna. Photo: Jeff Fuchs

We don’t exist to book your tickets on a pre-packaged tour, we’re here to help curate life-changing experiences. 

But it’s easy to use the word ‘life-changing experience,’ isn’t it? 

So, what do we actually mean by it? How do we go about achieving it? And why do we feel so passionately about creating a travel experience that’s going to challenge and change your perceptions? 

As a company that prides itself on pioneering sustainable and ethical travel practices across the Middle Kingdom, we don’t believe in travel as an escape from your life. For us, helping travelers to connect with people or a place through shared interests and experiences is our purpose. 

We believe that traveling in the correct way is truly meaningful and can create a positive impact that ricochets through people’s lives for many years to come. 

We know that any journey through China should be and can be life changing. 

And this is how we do it... 

First and Foremost We're a Community

Jerry Dong, one of our local Beijing guides

We achieve this, actually YOU achieve this, by empowering local communities to share their cultures and traditions as they are, real and unrefined, not put on for show. By connecting through shared experiences, we create a community of people with a shared passion for learning. A community of those who love to explore, discover new things, and share them with others.  

This is what we look for in all our local hosts. We care less about how many facts they can recite from their guiding textbook. We work with guides, experts, and artisans who are local to each destination and we ask them to share their stories and to interpret their culture for guests – treating our guests like they are a friend, not a tourist.  

This may surprise you, but we also like to work with, not against, China’s travel industry (including local Chinese governments) to prove that employing responsible travel practices, not earning a quick buck, will define China’s future for the better. We love creating safe spaces for young Chinese travel entrepreneurs to explore and develop their own views on the travel industry and offer them a platform to reach new audiences. You can read more about what this looks like in our latest project in Songyang County here. 

Preparing for a pop-up dinner last week in Songyang's Brown Sugar Factory

And we strive to ensure that the sides of China that are never portrayed in international mainstream media, can be made accessible. Whether it’s by helping you to visit them or by transporting you there virtually, we’re not here to tell you what a place is like, we’re here to make it accessible so that you can create your own views and discuss them with others. 

We're Experiential

Don't have time to read this whole article? Dive into our world in this 3-minute video. 

We don’t want your experience with us to start when you step off a plane or train and end when you get back on it. We want to ensure that you can continue to learn and grow even in your own backyard. We’ll invite you to join discussions with leading experts that we think you’ll find interesting, share our latest findings in off-the-beaten-path destinations, and encourage you to read up before you leave so that we can dive deeper when you’re actually there. 

Your local WildChina hosts won’t just show you around a place, they’ll immerse you in local life. And we encourage you to be all-in, willing to try things you might not normally. We can’t guarantee that eating chicken feet with a farmer in Guizhou will have you picking chicken feet over peanuts as a snack forever, but it’s these experiences, the ones that push you out of your comfort zone, that will allow real connections to be made. 

We Personalize

Exploring the Forbidden City with architecture expert Diana Chan Chieng

To ensure we can curate the right experiences for you, we customize all our private journeys so that you see the China that fascinates you. There’s no point in us arranging for you to learn kungfu with a master in Wudangshan if your interests lie in talking about the Flying Tigers with a village elder in Yunnan. Not only would you feel like you’d wasted money, but the Kungfu master would see your lack of interest and the village elder would miss out on sharing their stories with someone who truly appreciates them. 

We'll spend time understanding your interests and travel preferences and we will personally select experiences and activities that are best catered to you. Our travel designers are experts, they’ll share their opinions too and explain things in detail so you can make the right choice for you. 

But don’t get us wrong, we’re all for flexibility in a journey and serendipitous discovery too. If we see a local wedding or a festival, we’ll stop by and join in! This is where the real magic happens.  

We're Accessible

The WildChina team with Neil Schmid in Gansu and by the shores of Tibet's Yamdrok Lake

Creating a meaningful travel experience can’t be done with just a few emails back and forth with someone who might be a person - or could be a robot, who even knows these days - at the end of each reply. 

We want to get to know you. Every member of our travel design team is based in China and they are real humans with a passion for adventure who have traveled all over China.

We’ll personally select a dedicated travel designer who is an expert in the area of China or specialized subject you’d like to explore.  They’d love to meet you in person if you live in the same city, add you on WeChat so you can ask questions when they spring to mind and, when you’re on the ground with us, your travel designer will be just one call away the whole journey. They’ll check in regularly to make sure you’re having the trip of a lifetime and can change your itinerary at the drop of a hat, 24/7. 

We're Flexible 

We're as flexible as this lady we saw in the park (we wish!)

Traveling post-COVID does look different and we’re all well aware that things can change unexpectedly at any time. Thinking about this and having this possible stress on your shoulders can stop you really allowing yourself to be present in the moment.  

We take that stress off your shoulders and manage it at our end. All our local hosts have received COVID-19 training so they're ready to change plans to avoid crowds and add in extra bathroom stops so you can regularly wash your hands. They’ll also always have a supply of face masks and hand sanitizer available for you. 

If needed, we'll arrange for you to arrive at an airport earlier than normal for any additional health checks required and, if the COVID-19 risk level of a destination or site on your itinerary is changed to high, we'll work with you to immediately adjust your itinerary. 

We Offer Quality

Drinking only the best local baijiu with a family in Guizhou

Very honestly, if you’re just looking for a budget tour then a WildChina journey is probably not for you.  We pride ourselves in paying everyone involved in our journeys fairly so you don’t end up on “shopping” tours where the guide is getting a commission. That means that our prices might be higher than those who do not share our values or invest in the level of detail we provide. What we want to offer you is value for money. 

If you feel confident searching for the best flight deals and want to book them yourself, we won’t force you to book through us. If we can’t get you the best price on a hotel, we’ll tell you, so you have the option to book online. 

What we care about is adding real value to your journey through our expert knowledge and insider access. We believe that the side of China we love should be accessible, no matter what your budget. If you have a budget in mind that we need to stick to, tell us, and we’ll see what we can do. 
 

Want to explore further? Get in touch for our seasonal recommendations and to be connected with a personal travel designer today.

Read More 

Travel Around China | Everything You Need to Know

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WildChina was born on the sacred slopes of Mount Kailash in the Himalayas. Since WildChina’s first-ever trip in 2000, we have helped thousands of travelers enjoy life-changing experiences in every corner of this vast and endlessly inspiring nation. We never crop out reality or cocoon our travelers in a tourist bubble. We believe in the power of travel to transform, inspire, and bring people closer together, and we work tirelessly to perfect every detail for our guests. It’s this dedication, expertise, and passion for travel in China that makes us an award-winning industry leader.