Hello, all.

I am pleased to announce that HowToChina is now operational, and I can take on ~12 more customers for free during the course of the next month. This is a minor project that my company is doing on my shoulders, but in light of my experience, I can respond to all sorts of inquiries (e.g. spa in Changsha, bar in Xuxhou, hospital in in Zhengzhou) within 15 minutes.

The objective of this project is business, but we are starting with travel because I am solid in this space. The pricing is going to be around $10 per day for travel, and more for business... need based, but plan on over $100/day.

Get on Wechat and add howtochina as your friend; I will update this thread after we hit 12 members.

citibank/atm in Shanghai? Thank you!

I can respond to you hear of course, but I would prefer if you were to inquire within Wechat. This has several benefits:

1) Gives us, especially our Chinese staff, an opportunity to time ourselves and optimize operations;
2) Permits you (and other people) send us their locations using basic Andriod/IOS functionality;
and
3) Will help populate our recall database; the more information we store there, the cheaper our prices will be in the future.

In any event, when and if you do make this request, you can expect to receive:

1) A map
2) A phone number
3) Address in Chinese/English
and
4) An audio message the you can play for your taxi driver

For hard to find venues (street addresses in cities like Beijing are often completely useless), we provide pictures as well.

Please try it out and offer feedback. Thus far, our beta users are almost all veteran expats, and they require much less help than occasional travelers.

Many Thanks.

黄金城道和古北路的路口

If the passenger doesn't speak Chinese, how would an audio message help? Does it offer retorts for when the driver claims not to know the way?
This can happen with the written address too, but having an audio message more or less proves that the passenger doesn't know enough Chinese.

As an aside, what percentage of How ToChina users do you think uses (will use) mobile devices with GPS capabilities/apps that work in similar ways?

I am not a big fan of the audio messages myself because at this stage, they are annoying to create, upload, and send (Tencent clearly hasn't thought all of these issues through yet; pictures require a similar procedure).

But, maps and addresses are both easy for us. We just want to avoid having actual conversations with taxi drivers because this will cause costs to increase and operational efficiency to decrease. We will provide a phone number for emergency assistance.

To answer your second question, WeChat works the same on Android and IOS, and I couldn't fathom living anywhere without one. If you lack a smart phone, we have the means to order one on Taobao and have it sent to you. While Iphones and S4's are expensive in China, there is no other place in the world with comparable prices on entry level droids (as far as I know).

Added you guys today, nice functions. I get to China at least twice a year for work so will definitely make use of in the future.

Thank you!

Nice!

I added it. I love the link back to Flyertalk!

Have a question, is this for a subscription ?, e.g. Year, monthly?

Have 2 grandsons teaching English in Guilin, both very active mountain climbing, etc
One of their friends had a bad infection and it wasn't treated correctly

Can this service be used to find competent medical care if needed?

Thanks for info

This is the type of request that will surely incur short tern losses for us, but I love the challenge!

Giulin should cost the same as BJ/SH, and it will. We have you covered all over China!!!

this is very nice

When messaging us, would you mind telling us your FT handle? This might not help my Chinese colleagues because they aren't on FT, but it will help me. (I've already created aliases for the half of the FT members that I recognize from here.) Thanks. E

Hello, all. Recently, I've been busy with revenue generating projects so I haven't put a great deal of energy into marketing HowToChina, but this afternoon my business partner urged me to give HTC a little more juice because we've already gone through the trouble of setting it up and our staff is eager to help people.

I suggested that we simply turn on the website and announce ourselves in relevant LI groups, but his opinion is that I should stick with the FT-only strategy for now in order to give ourselves a chance to work out any kinks before we start charging money.

We already have 30 of you guys on board (thank you, by the way), but we need more activity (i.e. challenging but not crazy questions). As such, I am now providing our QR code which should, in theory, permit anyone with a smart phone to get on board in a matter of seconds.