Excellent China Eastern experience

I just had an excellent experience with China Eastern in New York, their service in their New York office is really good. Interestingly, it actually all started pretty bad.

Because we didn’t know exactly when we would fly back to Shanghai after the Tudou IPO we didn’t book a ticket yet. So this morning we called China Eastern to see if there were any business class seats available on their direct New York-Shanghai flight tomorrow that we can book with miles (I collected almost a million KLM miles and because China Eastern is part of Skyteam now, I can use them for this airline as well). That was possible, but we had to come to their office, in walking distance from our hotel.

When we arrived at their office the Chinese receptionist was extremely bitchy. I am not sure what her problem was, but she refused to speak English with me (“I am talking to your wife, so I speak Chinese”). Then she said we could not book award tickets with KLM miles (“If you are the owner of Skyteam you can, but you certainly can’t”), and told me to call KLM. So that’s what I did, and after a 15 minute call with KLM in Amsterdam it finally turned out they could not find any empty seats. Then the receptionist told me “Oh, I had already seen that in the system”. So I could have saved 15 minutes on the phone with KLM if she had just told me that… At that point I had had it with her and told her I was going to speak to the General Manager.

Grace and I walked through the office into the office of the GM and closed the door behind us. She was surprised of course, but after we told her what had just happened she apologized and said she would help us to try to solve it. She was extremely helpful and got her sales manager involved to sort out the problem. There were indeed no seats available in the system, but they changed that for us.

Problem was that the KLM and China Eastern computer systems are not compatible, so I still had to call KLM. I did so, but there they could still not see the seats in their system. Then China Eastern told me to ask KLM to put us on the waiting list for award tickets, but KLM’s system was not able to do that. The person in Amsterdam I talked to even got his manager involved, but they couldn’t figure out how to do it. They were very friendly, but finally they told me to let China Eastern call Air France in Paris to solve it. The sales manager did so, but Air France told them to call the US office. So that’s what the China Eastern person did, but then the USA office told him to call the KLM number in Holland again… And so of course we were stuck again at where we were an hour earlier (yes, this took a full hour).

But the China Eastern staff did not mind and kept on trying to find a solution. They even put our names in the system with a locator code so KLM could book the award tickets against them, but even this KLM could not do in their systems. Then we tried to book an open award ticket, but that also did not work. I have to say that KLM really tried, but it seems Skyteam’s computer systems are not fully aligned. After another 30 minutes Grace suddenly had an idea that we should have thought of earlier: book an award ticket on a date that was still available and then let China Eastern change it to tomorrow. And that finally worked, it still took me another 20 minutes on the phone with KLM, but eventually they managed to do it. Then China Eastern’s sales manager changed the reservation in his system, and we were done!

I have to say that I am really impressed by how willing China Eastern was to help. This was in their New York office on 5th Avenue (with a view of the Empire State Building!), so not a travel agent or so, and 2 people spent 2 hours helping us out. Maybe it was because they wanted to make up for the arrogant receptionist? I don’t know, but they did everything they could to solve it. We were allowed to sit in the GM’s office the whole 2 hours, were served drinks and had some nice chats with the Chinese staff while on hold on the phone. This changed my impression of China Eastern very much, and I am almost looking forward to tomorrow’s long flight – almost 15 hours non-stop flying time…

Tudou.com IPO on NASDAQ

Today Tudou.com was listed on the NASDAQ, almost 7 years after Gary and I founded the company! No time to write a post, so just a couple of random pictures that I took today.

Grace and Marc with the NASDAQ listing certificate

I love the slogan: Dream it, Do it, NASDAQ

NASDAQ welcomes Tudou on Times Square!

Closing ceremony, can you spot me?

More Tudou logos on Times Square

My blog is suddenly very slow

Since a few weeks the speed of my blog is a lot slower than it used to be. If you’re on a fast Internet connection you may not really notice it, but I now even got an email from a reader complaining about it.

Because I did not change any settings in WordPress and my hosting provider has not changed I had no idea what the problem was. But then UnitedStyles CTO Joop Dorresteijn noticed that the pictures cause the long loading time. It turns out that during my holiday I probably changed some settings in Flickr (where I host my pictures), and each time I now use a Flickr picture on my blog it does not load the 640 pixel version but the original high resolution picture – meaning normally 2-3 MB per picture. I will reverse the settings in my Flickr account, so from now pictures should be smaller again.

There is no quick fix to change the source file of the pictures in older blog posts, but maybe I will spend some time this weekend to manually change the links for the last couple of posts (there will be typhoon anyway, so I can’t go out).

Stormy days ahead: super typhoon Muifa will hit Shanghai this weekend

Every year a couple of typhoons pass by Shanghai, but the last big one that exactly hit Shanghai was on the weekend of August 6-7, 2005. Exactly 6 years later another super typhoon will hit Shanghai on the same weekend, also on 6-7 August. Current predictions are that typhoon Muifa will blow into Shanghai from the East China Sea and make landfall here late Saturday night, with wind speeds of up to 130 mp/h (210 km/h). Its path can still change, but has been pretty stable for the past 24 hours.

That means a weekend full of rain and wind, with just 15 minutes of complete silence when the core of the storm is over Shanghai. I saw on my blog that the last big typhoon brought up to 300 mm of rain in 2 days. Today’s rainstorm was a lot less heavy than Muifa, but that already transformed some roads into canals. I took the picture below from my car window on Hongxu Lu, the water was so deep that most cars did not dare to drive through it!

KLM Surprise

Two days ago I needed to check a KLM reservation, but I could not log onto the KLM site with my frequent flyer number. So I tweeted about it and KLM later sent me a reply wishing me a good flight, which I retweeted to my followers. A few hours later while boarding for a flight from Shanghai to Amsterdam, I gave my boarding pass to one of the ground staff at the gate and instead of the usual green light a red light turned on… She didn’t know why but told me to go to the desk to find out what was wrong.

Before I could even walk over to the desk 2 KLM employees approached me and told me that they had a surprise for me, that’s why my boarding pass set off an ‘alarm’. They told me that because of my tweets they wanted to thank me with a gift, and they handed me a Nike paper bag containing an Nike iPod sensor! Because they followed me on Twitter they read I am a runner, so this was an excellent gift. The KLM social media reps also took a picture of me with the present for their site, I must have looked really surprised in the picture.

I just did a Google search and found that KLM does this more often, they even have a site for this: http://surprise.klm.com/ They describe the concept there as follows: “To see how happiness spreads, we committed little acts of kindness to brighten a passenger’s day. So next time you fly with us, we might just pop up somewhere unexpectedly.”

I really appreciate this KLM, especially considering our love-hate relationship on social media over the past years. Based on some tweets of mine Dutch newspaper Het Parool even wrote an article about among others KLM’s Twitter policy. At that time (over 2 years ago), KLM did not really have one yet, but that has changed since. KLM is since a few days 24 hours a day active on social media like Twitter – despite their Twitter profile still saying 8 AM- 11 PM.

Thanks a lot for the surprise KLM. I am impressed by your new social media strategy, lots of other companies (not only airlines) can learn from this. One of my personal social media slogans is “The more you give, the more you’ll get”, so I am sure for you this strategy will lead to more positive results as well.

Running holiday

One of the goals that I set myself for our summer holiday in Europe was to get into a much better running shape. I will run the New York Marathon in just over 3 months, and because I likely won’t have a lot of time for the necessary long training runs, I at least wanted to make sure my basic shape is in place now already. Next to that I wanted to run outside on my Vibram Five Fingers. In Shanghai I mainly run on the treadmill in my home gym, both because of the air pollution and because it’s just too hot to run outside. But in order to run 42 kilometers almost barefoot (the Vibram FF’s feel very similar to running barefoot) you need to do quite some training on the road, or at least on another surface than a treadmill, as well.

The runs worked out much better than I had imagined. Over the past 3 weeks I did at least 5 runs over 15 kilometers (incl. 2 half marathons), and I even did a 16 km and a 21 km run within 2 days of each other. Although I still feel a bit tired after the runs I do not have a lot of muscle ache anymore (after my first runs that was still the case), and the next day I feel good enough to run again. Happy to know this, it gives me a lot of confidence for the actual marathon.

During my vacation I ran on the island of Vlieland on the beach and through the dunes, I ran in France in the hills in the Provence close to St. Paul de Vence, and I ran several times in the woods around Ommen in The Netherlands. Running in the woods is great, you don’t meet any other people once you are more than a few hundred meters away from the closest road and nature is beatiful. I found a lot of new trails to explore in the future, and with my Nike GPS+ watch I was able to find them all back on Google Maps later. I didn’t take my phone or camera during my runs, but if I had I could have shot a lot of great pictures.

In a way I was lucky that for most of the time the weather was not very good in The Netherlands. It was way too cold for the time of year and it rained a lot. Perfect for running. I like to run in the rain, it makes long distance running easier and you don’t meet any other people – most prefer to stay dry indoors. The only downside is that the trails (I ran a lot on trails in the woods) can be slippery, and you have to watch out that you don’t fall.

And of course that’s what happened to me: during a 16 km trail run I slipped after about 10 km and hurt myself. I managed to get up again and finished the run without too much pain, and I thought things were fine. But when I arrived home it suddenly started to hurt a lot, I didn’t really feel it while running. I will spare you the details, but if you fall down while running at 12-13 km/h and there are some small stones on the ground you can imagine the result… Anyway, I am fine again now, and I started running again. But I will be even more careful in the future.

Today we will fly back to Shanghai, I am happy to go back but I am not too happy that I will have to run on the treadmill again from now on. As I have said several times before already on this blog, the thing I miss most in Shanghai is running outside in nature. You can’t have it all…

Visiting the Circus Sydney show in Ommen

The last time I visited a real circus was probably when I was in primary school. At that time there were still a couple of local circuses traveling around The Netherlands, but I think most of them stopped operating many years ago already. I have seen other top circuses such as the DPRK State Circus in Pyongyang (amazing acts, but you can only see them if you manage to do a trip to North-Korea), some circuses in Shanghai and of course the Cirque Du Soleil. But they are different from what I call a ‘real circus’: a traveling group of entertainers with clowns, animals and of course a big tent, that stays in each town for just a few days.

After reading Water For Elephants a couple of months ago, a book that describes the life of people in a traveling circus in the US in the 1930s, I was looking forward to seeing a real circus again. So when I saw a circus tent being set up next to the Vecht river in Ommen I decided to go there. For some reason the local government in Ommen did not allow the circus to advertise in town (something I totally disagree with, this is a great event for kids and their parents and for the many tourists in Ommen that pay lots of tourist tax every day, and the government should support this – but I digress), so it was difficult to find out when the shows would take place.

So yesterday I just drove my car to the tent of Circus Sydney, asked the people there and immediately reserved tickets for the show this afternoon. The best tickets of course, when you only go to a real circus once every 20-30 years you might as well get the best seats! So this afternoon we woke up the kids a bit earlier than usual from their afternoon nap and we drove over to the circus to see the show.

Circus Sydney seems to be an Australian circus that is now traveling around Europe. They are not very big (about 20 entertainers in total during today’s show), but the show is fun, especially with kids. They have a clown that fills the intermezzos, acrobats, dancers, and of course several animals (horses, dogs, llamas, camels).

Because we were on the front seat we had an excellent view, but sometimes we were a bit too close to all the actions for our kids. At a certain point Scott was so scared of the horses that were a mere 50 centimeters away from him that he decided to move to the second row, where Elaine was already sitting. Later he came back, but he held onto me and my dad tightly when the camels or other animals came too close.

During his first act the clown needed an assistant and he asked me to join him in the ring. Always fun to do, so of course I participated. Scott was very happy to see me in the ring with the clown!

I liked the show. You can’t compare it to the big shows like you see in China or in North-Korea, or to big budget shows like Cirque Du Soleil, but it has a very friendly, family-like feeling. Some small things went wrong during the show, but that makes it actually more interesting to me. I enjoyed watching the 2 hour performance (incl. a 15 min break), and the kids also loved it. If you’re in Ommen over the next 3 days or if you see Circus Sydney (owned by Alexander Scholl) somewhere in your area, make sure you visit. Especially if you have kids it’s a wonderful afternoon or evening out.

Chinese Youth And Mobile Phone Usage

Enovate, a Chinese research company focused on the Chinese youth, published an interesting infographic about the usage of mobile devices. Although I am not sure how scientifically valid their findings are, the results are worth sharing.
Some of their findings include:
– 18-22 year old people spend more time on their mobile phones than on a computer. The 23-30 year old group still uses the computer a bit more (35% vs. 31%) but when you also take tablets into account (14%), mobile also wins by far in that category.
– People would rather give up their computer than their phone
– Daily must-have content includes news, video and SNS

Conclusion: The future is mobile – now already in China, but soon also in the rest of the world!

Scott and Elaine watching cows

A few kilometers from my parents house is a farm that sells its own cheese. My parents and I drove over to buy several kinds of cheese and took the kids with us. Right at the moment we were there the cows were herded back into their stables so they could be milked. Scott and Elaine had the time of their lives watching the huge animals fighting to go through the narrow door.

Scott was not afraid at all, but when we later walked through the stable Elaine held me very tight and only peeked occasionally at the big animals. Nice for them to see real cows, you don’t see them in Shanghai.