Last Friday I was having a drink at the rooftop terrace of Bar Rouge with friends visiting Shanghai and we were looking at the Peace Hotel next door. I told them that the place had been under re-construction for ages and that I wondered if it would ever reopen.

The Shanghai Daily answered my question today, writing that the hotel should reopen in March 2010. Searching my old blog posts I found that the hotel closed its doors for renovation in early 2007, so when it opens again it will have been closed for almost 3 years. Have they been working on it for the past years or did the negotiations take years to finalize?

According to my favorite Shanghai English language paper (luckily for them they have no competition) the new name of the hotel will be the Fairmont Peace Hotel Shanghai. The landmark property on the Bund will keep its Art Deco style but the interior will be completely renovated. The Fairmont will offer 250 room and suites, with prices between USD 300 and 400 – several times higher than the prices before the renovation. Hopefully the Fairmont will manage the hotel better than the former owners, because it used to be a total mess. I stayed there a few times in my early China years (around 2000 or 2001) and I remember that there were always problems with the service, the rooms or the noise.

By the way, I wonder whether the Fairmont Peace Hotel will get its own Twitterstream as well. I noticed that last week the new Fairmont in Beijing started following me on Twitter, so who knows I might soon be able to tweet with the new Peace Hotel 🙂

Just now I was checking whether Google already indexes my new site www.chijs.com (to be officially launched in a couple of days after uploading some more press articles), when I suddenly saw a result for a Wikipedia page for my name. I was very surprised because I had no idea somebody created one for me. The page contains a couple of mistakes, but I am afraid the Wikipedia rules do not allow me to change those.

I wonder who wrote the article? I can probably find that out on Wikipedia, but I did not figure out yet how to do that (history only shows 2 changes in late March this year). It’s likely a Dutch speaking person, because there are links to two Dutch articles. Feel free to let me know in the comments or in a private email if you are the original author. I am honored!

After my blog post about Air Asia‘s treatment of its customers I received a email from the company telling me that the USD 3000 that they have been sitting on since January will be paid back to me in 30 to 60 working days! Worst case that means an additional 3 months of waiting to get my money back. Ain Izzaty, a customer support staff at Air Asia sent me the following explanation why it takes ‘some time’ to pay me back the money they owe me:

I will explain to you why it takes some time to process it. Once the agent place the queue for refund in the systems it will escalated to their manager on duty to verify and approve then the manager will escalate it to the finance department, and once finance department received the report they will check with our accounts department and then they will send the report to the bank. Kindly take note that Air Asia finance department is not based in Kuala Lumpur, its based in Thailand.

Bank will take some time to process it and transfer the fund to your bank, all this process normally takes 30 – 60 working days to process from the date your booking placed on refund queue excluding Saturdays and Sundays. The process get delayed sometimes if there is any problem between bank to bank transfer however the problem will be solved by the bank. We have escalated this matter to finance department to check with the bank and speed up the process. Thank you so much for your patience all this while, kindly check your credit card statement from time to time. We will email you the status once we get the reply from the finance department.

Thank you for flying with Air Asia.

Air Asia, this is total bullsh*t. I used to work for a multinational in finance and know exactly how these procedures work. They can be done in hours or maximum a few days, not months. Do you really think that it makes any difference that your finance department is in Thailand and not in Malaysia? Or do you transport your payment instructions by bicycle from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok?

You are just delaying the payment as much as possible and the customer is obviously not important to you. I hoped the issue would be solved after the long phone call on Friday, but you’re only making it worse. I know you are a low-cost airline but that’s not a justification to treat your customers like dirt. Short-term thinking will hurt your long-term results. The end result is that you lost a customer and that I do not mind spreading the word about this.

During Chinese New Year my family and I had a holiday in Malaysia, and we took Air Asia for that trip. I was quite positive about the airlines (see also my blog post about the trip) and planned to use them again. That has changed in the mean time.

When I received my credit card statement in February I noticed that Air Asia charged me two times for the flights, instead of USD 3000 I paid them USD 6000. Looking back I should have immediately canceled the booking on my credit card, but I made the mistake of contacting the airline about it (or actually, my travel agent helped me and did this for me). They asked us to send them some materials to prove that there was a double payment and they would take care of it. After waiting for two weeks or so we did not hear anything, so we called them again. The reaction: we never received your email… What can you say? So we sent them the info once more, and this time they received it. When we again did not hear anything and informed what was going on, we were told we had to wait 30 working days to get a reply. I was very unhappy with this, but decided to play it nice and wait.

Of course after 30 days still no answer from Air Asia, so our travel agent called them again. This time the answer was that they get hundreds of emails and that we would have to wait for an additional 30 working days starting April 17. The travel agent asked me what she should do, and I decided to make a phone call myself.

Customer support employee Mr. Loong Jian had the bad luck to get me on the phone. I calmly explained the situation and demanded to get the money back immediately. They had been sitting on USD 3000 that belongs to me for over 3 months, and I told him that I do not accept any more excuses and want the full amount back straight away. He apologized a couple of times and said he would look into it. He put me on hold for a while and then told me that finance was processing it now, and that I had to wait and check next month’s credit card statement.

I repeated that I did not want to wait anymore, I had been waiting for way too long already without any communication from their side. I asked to get a written confirmation either by email or fax that the money would be on its way to me. He could not give that to me he said, so I asked to speak to his manager. Loong Jian told me that he was not sure if a manager was available but I insisted. So he put me on hold for over 5 minutes, but when the music finally stopped he was back on the line. There was no manager available to speak to me is what he told me…

Now I was really getting pissed, and I made that very clear to him. This is not the way you treat your customers! I told him I would not hang up until I would be able to speak to a manager. He probably thought I was bluffing but soon found out I had no intention to hang up, I had been waiting long enough. Then he said that he would end the conversation from his side. I could not believe what I heard – he wanted to hang up on me! I know a thing or two about call centers, and they do not like it if customers ask for managers. But I also know there is always a manager available in case things escalate. So I told him that hanging up on me would only make the situation more difficult, and that I would also make trouble for him. He then said he would put me on hold again, which I did not agree to. He solved that one in a nice way by putting me on mute! Well, at least I did not have to listen to the stupid music anymore.

My strategy worked, because eventually (after another 5 to 10 minutes) I got his team leader on the phone, Ms. Lee SC. She had received better training than her employees, and with her I was able to come to a solution soon. She promised that they would send my travel agent a written confirmation today that the money would be wired back to me. That’s what I was looking for, now let’s hope that Air Asia will keep its word and that the USD 3000 will be back in my account soon. Too bad the whole thing cost me 40 minutes, but without it I may have never received the money.

I Twittered about it while on the phone and also copied Air Asia’s Twitter account (@airasiablog) on it a few times. No reaction from them so far, it will be interesting to see how good they are at using Web 2.0 and reacting to clients. Their customers support certainly s*cks, and they clearly did not invest in training their call center staff. I’ve had it with Air Asia and likely won’t use them anymore. If a company does not treat its customers with respect they don’t deserve my money.

Update: Air Asia sent me an email that I will have to wait another 30-60 working days before I can get my money back (see my blog post about this). That theoretically might mean another 3 months of waiting for my money! Air Asia may be a low cost airline (one reason why I tried them out), but if this is the way they treat their customers in order to keep costs low they won’t see me back. Next time I will fly Malaysia Airlines again to Kuala Lumpur.

Until next Tuesday the Shanghai Autoshow takes place again, and of course I visited this year as well. I say of course, because I worked for 7 years in the automotive industry (for Daimler/Mercedes-Benz) and that is what brought me to China. I even used to write columns for Dutch car magazine Autovisie about the Chinese automotive industry (I stopped doing that about a year ago).

I was lucky to get trade visitors tickets to the show (thanks to BMW China), so I did not have to go during the extremely busy public days. I went with some people from Tudou, who had journalist passes. Tudou is an official media (I never realized that actually) and has its own teams at the Autoshow that produce original content for our car channel at http://auto.tudou.com/. If you want to see some footage of the show, that is a good place to go.

The exhibition has changed a lot over the years, from a small not-too-important auto show it is now among the most important in the world. It is huge: you need hours to just walk around the whole place to see all the models. Because I did not have that much time, I only went to the most important or interesting brands. For me those are mainly the Chinese brands: outside China people laugh about them (well, also still some people inside China do this) but they have come a long way and I think the next General Motors will come from China. The name of that company? Likely Chery, but also BYD and Geely stand a chance. One of these brands will first build out their business in China and then conquer the rest of the world.

Their quality may not be up too Western standards yet, but that will eventually come. Or maybe some people won’t care that much about extremely high standards when you can get a good car for maximum half the price of a Western model. Their designs are so much better than just 2-3 years ago, it amazes me how quickly these companies improve and innovate. Look at BYD for example, this company started in 2003 (yes, that’s less than 6 years ago – before that they made batteries) and is now already one of the top players in the electric vehicle segment. Their F6 model (a mid-size sedan) can be recharged up to 70% in just 10 minutes time!

Chinese car companies also like to copy designs, and Geely did once again an excellent job at that during this show. After copying Mercedes-Benz models for many years they now decided to go one step higher and copy a Rolls-Royce front. Decide for yourself if they did a good job. The car has one major innovation, however: the back seat consists of just one huge emperor-like seat! I don’t think that will sell well in Western markets, but I am sure many Chinese bosses outside the tier 1 cities would love to show off being driven around in this car.

The excellent Danwei blog today has one of these only-in-China stories: A Beijing real estate developer decided to boost its sales by encouraging buyers to date its sales girls. If a couple gets married they receive a RMB 60,000 wedding present. The deal for the girls is that they not only get an 8% commission but can also find a wealthy husband. But there is probably more to the story as Danwei points out:

A local Real Estate executive I spoke to pointed out that the girls on offer are not that attractive. His theory is that the developer is not making money on selling apartments and so it signed a deal with a matchmaking agency to marry these “unwanted” girls to rich husbands. In return, the developer will receive much more than RMB 60,000 for every girl they manage to “give away”. This way, the girls don’t lose face by putting themselves on sale, the husbands don’t lose face by going directly to an agency to look for a bride, and the developer makes a nice profit. In a country with too many apartments and not enough girls, this doesn’t sound like a bad idea.

Read the whole story here and check out some of the available sales girls here.

When I wrote my blog post yesterday about the 2009 Tudou Video Festival I did not include any video footage of the award ceremony yet. Today I looked for and found a couple of short festival video’s on Tudou. This one gives a short impression of the festival, this one was shot before the festival started and this one gives a 5 minute overview of the award ceremony, including some of the speeches.

If you want to see some pictures, I created a set of some of my own (and of a few of Tudou CTO Michael Zhao’s) pictures here. Some more festival pictures, taken by Flickr user Dexteryy, can be found here.

There were also tons of articles in the Chinese press, see among others here, here, here and here.

This weekend the 2nd edition of the Tudou Video Festival took place in Shanghai. Compared to last year’s event, this year’s edition was a lot bigger and produced very professionally. Last year’s event in an old church high up in the mountains in Moganshan was great, but it still had a start-up feeling. The 2nd edition felt almost like the Oscars, something the presenter (Hu Yi Hu from Phoenix TV) also said.

Awards were handed out in 16 categories during the night. In total there had been 2000 video submissions and 5 million people voted online for the videos. During awards night an audience of 1000 people attended the ceremony, among others famous actors and presenters, government officials, business people, venture capitalists and film directors. The event was streamed live on Tudou as well and several TV camera’s recorded the whole evening. Winners not only received the Tudou Video Award, but also a BenQ 42″ plasma TV, a notebook computer and a desktop computer (thanks for sponsoring BenQ!).

I enjoyed the evening very much and was once again surprised by the high level of creativity. User generated content can compete with professionally produced content, that’s what this evening proved to me. Several of the selected directors will get the chance to work with the China Film Group. Who knows, maybe the next Zhang Yimou was among our winners last night!

If you want to see some of the winning films on Tudou, you can see all of them here. The categories are all in Chinese, but if you mouse over them you will see the English name in the link.