3A – Your Entrepreneurship Story

In June 2019, I went on a trip to Kazakhstan, a Central Asian country, with founders of two large travel agencies in China, and several guests from tourism industry. The main objective of this trip is to find new opportunities for business growth from Kazakhstan's relatively underdeveloped tourism resources.

Travel agencies in China that focus on those popular routes have faced fierce competition these years. Since the industry has become less profitable, some travel agencies have started to dig tourism resources in neighboring countries and planned to extend their trips to these countries.

Kazakhstan is one of those countries. It's adjacent to Xinjiang, an autonomous region of China, and has some spectacular natural sceneries. In order to experience the details of the final product from a tourist's point of view, we have tried to enter Kazakhstan by train, bus, and air; we have tried out a variety of restaurants and hotels that are up to the standard; we have also visited all famous tourist attractions around Almaty. During our trip, Charyn Canyon National Park was the most impressive part for me. Partly because of natural scenery and mainly because of the vision of an entrepreneur, Mr. Tao. As a founder of a large travel agency and an airline, he had substantial experience in tourism industry. Although the scenery was stunning, he pointed out that natural scenery itself is not sufficient to attract Chinese tourists as the majority of Chinese tourists feel more comfortable visiting places with infrastructure and services like skywalks, convenient stores, paved road and stairs, aerial lifts, and helicopter rides. He then preliminarily envisioned a multi-phase investment plan to fund the infrastructure development of the national park. To my surprise, we also had a meeting with Consul General Zhang Wei at the Consulate General of China in Almaty, Zhang has introduced business environment in Greater Almaty Area and showed us several investment cases in other industries.

Overall, I feel that this trip has benefited me a lot, as it was a knowledge-abundant trip. While attending multiple of their decision-making processes, in conference room, during lunch, and even while we were on our way, I absorbed ideas and opinions from people with different backgrounds, professions, and experiences.