The first time I heard about the BOSS (Beijing one stop tourists service) from my local friends a couple of months ago. My local mates told me that actually it's a group of young guiders and tourism professionals of some top tourism agencies like CITS and CYTS. But the state-owned firms are very much corrupted and pay poorly to their staffs, therefore these young guys decided to do more independent businesses by creating a network and sharing tourists information. Two weeks ago, my big boss and his wife came to visit Beijing for a meeting and then took a week holiday here. I was in London at the time and couldn't escort him the journel (great!!). I got contact of the BOSS through personal Guanxi (nofing like in Europe where everything can be found on google) and rang them to look after my boss (hehe, ask BOSS to look after of my boss!) for the whole week. And then I realised that they actually could do every little thing to take care of my boss through out the journey, because they had a good number of professionals to back up their service. The guys put my boss and his wife into a luxury 5* hotel downtown. An English speaking young man drove them to all parts of interesting places in Beijing with a brand new M-Benz S500!!!!! Any way, when my boss came back and met me in London office after the trip, he couldn't stop smiling and told me that it was the best holiday he had ever had and he was treated like a king!!!! Of course, I paid for all the trip and the guider even refused to take any tips!!! But two points I need to be made clear, 1. the quote was a lot cheaper than I thought as the BOSS guys don't need to pay tax and commission to state-owned agencies , normally altogether accounting for 40% of the money we pay. 2. I am not an idiot as the money I invested on my boss's holiday were paid off straight away by receiving a big bonus from my boss last week. Chinese way of doing business does work in British company, Great!!!

Its really a great experience for me and I want to share this with you guys. These young educated guiders are well experienced and know all sorts of places in Beijing where we are most interested to visit: historical stuff, shopping areas, nice hotels, restaurants, pubs, night clubs, and even somewhere else... But the most important thing is that they have a widespread local network which helps us to cut down costs and make the journey much more entertaining and safer.

As you guys can see, I am now more Chinese than Western. The last piece of bits, in Chinese culture, it's extremely rude to put friends' contact details on a BBS. So if any of you guys is interested in getting in touch with these BOSS guys, email me and I will let you know their contacts. [email protected]