Lifestyle importer starts business as hobby

He Zhi in Monaco, 2013. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Outbound tourism in China is booming as wallets get thicker and thicker. Trips to France by Chinese visitors rose to 2 million last year. And Atout France, the French government's institute promoting tourism abroad, hopes that the number can reach 5 million annually in 2020 as France opens nine more visa application centers in China this year.

"The market is huge," says He. Wayatrip saw sales reach more than 400,000 yuan in the first half of this year.

Although it's a pretty good start, He thinks they are facing the toughest time since the launch of the business.

"The company is short of staff, so everyone is doing various tasks. And due to time difference and geographical distance, it's hard to manage two teams in Paris and Shanghai," says He.

More importantly, their business mode of providing C2C services has not been extensively accepted by Chinese tourists.

"Customer-to-customer service in travel is not new abroad. Tourists pay their 'travel pal' for their tour guide service and the travel pal share their insight into a city as well as practical travel information and experiences." He prefers to use the term "travel pal" instead of the traditional "tour guide".

The problem is that they are short of money to do large-scale promotion of such model, and monthly deals actually were below their expectation.

Once when they did the promotion with leaflets in front of the French visa center in Shanghai this April, many who went to submit the visa application preferred packaged tour and turned cold shoulder to them, though they went to the visa center dressed like a typical Frenchman, wearing false beard and berets to attract attention.

So DIY tours or the city treasure hunting programs are an alternative to sustain the company. "It will take time to define the appropriate business model but we hope our start-up finally becomes a C2C service provider in real sense," says He.