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The Great Wall of China

WOW Moment: A Helicopter Ride Over The Great Wall of China

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We take our jobs very seriously here at WendyPerrin.com—to report on and recommend the best travel solutions and trip-planning help out there. After all, if we’re wrong about anything, we must answer to you—an audience of the most experienced and discerning travelers around. That’s why the review process is such an integral part of Wendy’s Trip Support System. In fact, it’s the main reason we ask all of you who use The WOW List to use the black CONTACT buttons on it when you contact a Trusted Travel Expert. That way, we can stay in touch with you and, after your trip, find out how everything went. Your feedback is enormously helpful to your fellow travelers—and, in turn, their reviews are enormously helpful to you, when you come back to use The WOW List again.

But don’t listen to us when we tell you the benefits of using Wendy’s WOW system to plan your trips. Listen to Lisa and Scott Dettmer, frequent travelers from the Silicon Valley area who’ve been using Wendy’s travel specialists for years. They recently returned from their latest adventure, arranged by Mei Zhang, Wendy’s Trusted Travel Expert for China. Since this was the Dettmers’ third trip using the WOW system, they earned something special: a surprise insider experience curated by Wendy and added to their itinerary for free. We call these WOW Moments, and anyone who uses our trip-planning system can earn one if they simply use our WOW List buttons and review their Trusted Travel Expert after their trip. (Here’s more info on how to get your own WOW Moment).

We’re not sure all of you have heard about WOW Moments yet, so we called up Lisa and Scott to let them share, in their own words, their experience working with Wendy’s Trusted Travel Experts, and what they thought of their WOW Moment surprise.

Q: How often do you two travel?

Lisa: We do one significant trip each year—like a two-week, far-away trip—and then we do quite a few smaller trips throughout the year. Our first trip [using one of Wendy’s travel specialists] was to Africa when Wendy was at Condé Nast Traveler. The planning worked so well, and the trip was so tailored to our needs, that I’ve continued to use her specialists throughout the last four or five years. Every single time we’ve had just wonderful experiences. I wouldn’t plan a trip without doing it that way—because it works.

Q: You recently returned from China. Was this a special trip?

Scott: We wanted to approach it a little differently. We didn’t want a traditional tourist approach to China, and it was nice that [Mei and her team] were able to do something we thought was unique and customized to our preferences.

Q: Can you give an example?

Scott: We like to hike and be outdoors, and we like animals, and a lot of travelers would not think you would go to China to have those experiences. Most think it’s going to be an urban experience: You’ll see the Great Wall, the terra-cotta warriors, and the Forbidden City, and that’s it. But WildChina delivered. Lisa’s experience of being up close and personal with a panda made the trip for her, and the other was being able to hike out into the forest in the southwestern area of China to find the endangered snub-nosed monkeys and hang out for hours watching them play around in the trees. They did a nice job of giving us the urban experience and the rural experience.

Q: Walk me through your WOW Moment: What happened?

Scott: It was a ton of fun and a great surprise, and the lead-up to it was amusing. We were in Beijing and had already gone out to one portion of the Great Wall, at Mutianyu, and had a great visit there. The next day I was supposed to visit my office in Beijing, but when our tour guide found out that I wasn’t going in, he started making a bunch of texts and phone calls. Then he said, “Since you’re not going to the office, we would really like to take you to another portion of the Great Wall.” We thought, “Well, we’ve already seen the Great Wall.” I should back up and explain that our guide was such a gentle and accommodating guy—really nice—but now he was like, “No, I think you should go to this other section of the Great Wall.” So we said, [adopts a skeptical voice] “Okay…I guess we’ll follow your good judgment.” [Laughs]

Lisa: That morning I started to put on my tennis shoes, thinking we’re going to hike, and our guide gets this big smile on his face and says, “Oh, you won’t be needing your tennis shoes.” And as soon as he told us that, he told us this was our WOW Moment.

Scott: I have a special affinity for helicopters because I started taking lessons in the past year—and we went up in one of the types I’ve flown, or kind of flown. [Laughs] And what a kick! Flying over different portions of the Great Wall! It certainly is a very different perspective. And to see the wall winding in its serpentine terrain across that mountainous terrain—it was gorgeous. The guide got to go up with us, and he’d never been up in a helicopter before. It was a ton of fun, and everyone had giant smiles.

Q: Lisa, you’re the one who worked with our Trusted Travel Expert to plan the trip. Did you have any idea what the WOW Moment was going to be?

Lisa: It was a total surprise, and that makes it really fun. I’d thought the WOW Moment was another thing that wasn’t in the original itinerary: WildChina had added in a sidecar ride through Shanghai. So, in my mind, since we’d never talked about what the WOW Moment would be, I assumed that’s what it was—I thought we’d already had it. So [the helicopter ride] was really a surprise, even though I was the planner of the trip!

Q: What’s your take on working with a Trusted Travel Expert to plan a trip? We’d like your honest opinion.

Lisa: It was neat that we felt like [Mei’s deputy] Jenny Zhao was constantly monitoring us throughout the trip and always knew where we were. She was our air-traffic controller on this trip. We also appreciated her on-the-spot analysis of our options: At one point, the weather was going to be pretty cold, and they were predicting snow in an area that was a significant drive away, and we thought maybe we should not do that portion. So we contacted Jenny to talk about alternatives, and she very quickly did the research to let us know what our options were. She encouraged us to go because if we canceled it we’d miss out on [a connecting portion] of the trip, and this way we could use the day to relax if the weather wasn’t that good. But it was a lovely day: We went on a hike with our guide, and we are so glad we didn’t make the changes. She encouraged us to stay the course, and that worked out really well.

Q: What should other travelers know about Wendy’s WOW system?

Scott: Our view is why wouldn’t everyone in the world do this? Using the sort of approach we do with your organization and with the local travel experts—why wouldn’t everyone do that? It makes so much sense. It really is terrific.

Lisa: For me, it was doing one trip and making a mistake before I found Wendy. One time we went to Belize, and I booked us at a resort that had just recently opened. It looked awesome on the website, but we got there and they had not worked out the kinks yet. It was an expensive trip, and it was really a bummer because that would never have happened with a Wendy specialist. I did a couple trips where it felt like we spent a lot of money and took time, and they were fine but they were not great. And then we did our first Wendy trip, and I was amazed. It’s not that it’s more expensive [to use one of Wendy’s Trusted Travel Experts]. I feel like it’s a great deal: the resources that the travel specialists provide and for what we spend on these trips. If I think about the total trip cost, it’s so worth it to have that guaranteed. Basically, it’s a guarantee that the trip is going to be successful, that the places we stay and the activities are going to be good. I feel like it’s an insurance policy for us.

 

Wendy Wants To Amp Up Your Trip!

On every third qualifying trip, Wendy will add to your itinerary a surprise WOW Moment. A WOW Moment is an exclusive insider experience that helps make a trip extraordinary. Each WOW Moment is totally different. They vary depending on a huge range of factors, including the country you’re headed to, the timing of your trip, logistics, availability, and more. You can read a sampling of the more over-the-top WOW Moments (those most conducive to editorial coverage) here. Learn which trips qualify, and how the process works, here: Wendy Wants To Amp Up Your Trip!

The Milestone Hotel, London

WOW Moment: A Surprise Pastry Class and Picnic in London

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The best trips are packed with unique, memorable experiences that you couldn’t have anticipated or that turned out even better than what they sounded like in your itinerary. That’s the magic we all hope for when we travel, and it’s the magic that Wendy’s recommended travel specialists have up their sleeves—it’s part of the reason she names them to her list of the world’s best trip designers in the first place.

To thank all of you loyal users of Wendy’s WOW trip-planning system, we launched a reward program a while back: Wendy’s WOW Moments. Readers who’ve used our trip-request forms to contact one of our Trusted Travel Experts, and who have contributed reviews of those trips afterward, receive a complimentary gift from Wendy herself on their third trip. And we’re not talking fruit baskets or late checkouts. We’re talking about a personalized insider-access experience, hand-picked to suit your itinerary and arranged by the Trusted Travel Expert. Read eligibility requirements and program details here.

This loyalty program is now in full swing, and the first WendyPerrin.com traveler to earn a WOW Moment got to experience it on a trip to London. We wanted to find out from the traveler how this first-ever WOW Moment went, so we spoke to her by telephone to get the scoop.

family picnic in Hyde Park London

Paula da Rosa and her family enjoyed a picnic in Hyde Park. Photo: Celebrated Experiences

The travelers:

Paula da Rosa, her husband John, and her three children live in Vancouver, and as Paula told us over the phone, they are not big travelers. “We keep things pretty tight between Vancouver and Whistler. We ski,” she said. But this summer, her husband had a sabbatical and the family wanted to plan a special trip for their eight weeks off. They started with time in Hawaii (planned by Jay Johnson), followed by a villa rental in France (planned by Annie Flogaus) and then London, where they used to live. The London portion is where we provided their WOW Moment, working with Jonathan Epstein, one of Wendy’s Trusted Travel Experts for England.

The WOW Moment:

For the WOW Moment, Jonathan arranged a special afternoon at London’s Milestone Hotel, where the grown-ups would try their hands at the art of Sabrage and sip Champagne, and the kids would dive into the art of pastry decoration. The family of five was then whisked away to a luxurious picnic in Hyde Park, with the Champagne they had sabered, the macarons and cupcakes they had adorned, and a cornucopia of other treats.

kids pastry class London

The kids got to decorate pastries while the grown-ups got to sip Champagne. Photo: Celebrated Experiences

The traveler’s review:

“Did the experience meet my expectations? It was expertly executed, it was super smooth,” Paula reported back to us over the phone. “It was definitely more than I thought it was going to be. I guess I was hoping it wasn’t going to be super cheesy, you know what I mean? We just don’t do cheesy. We’re not the family in Disneyland with the ears—that’s just not us.”

“When we arrived and there was a whole line of staff to greet us—the hotel manager through the pastry chef through the young woman who led it all, and she was quite exceptional—I did have what I like to call a ‘Canadian moment’, where I thought, ‘Really? All this fuss just for us?’ We sort of looked at each other thinking we should be sharing some of this bounty.’ [Paula laughs] It was very, very memorable, that’s for sure.”

“We go into a conservatory within the hotel and they were giving us history about the hotel and location, which was interesting, and they had John sabre a bottle of Champagne. That was pretty funny. [Laughs] He put on this cape and hat, and we both looked at each other and thought we were stepping into cheesy, but it was for the fun of it.”

The Conservatory restaurant at the Milestone Hotel, London

The Conservatory restaurant at the Milestone Hotel, London

Afterward, Paula and John enjoyed some of the Champagne they’d opened while the kids were taken to the Oratory dining room to decorate macarons and cupcakes. “That was very nice, because the five of us had been traveling together for weeks at that point, so it was lovely for mom and dad to have a minute to be husband and wife,” she says. “And it was nice for the kids to meet the pastry chef, and have the lady who was organizing it snap pictures.”

When tea was announced a short while later, Paula says she expected to be walked right into the next room. “But they said, ‘Oh no, we’ll do it outside.’” Packing up baskets of tea treats plus the kids’ macarons and John’s Champagne, the staff led the family across the street to Hyde Park, where they’d already set up a picnic site. “We sat back and enjoyed the afternoon,” Paula recalls. “When we finished, we called over, and they came over and packed it all up, and then as parting gifts they gave us gift bags of teddy bears and things from the hotel and had made a framed photo of our family, and then we were driven back to our hotel.”

“This was nowhere near what we were expecting. But I had been thinking in the back of my mind, Wouldn’t it be neat to have a picnic? So this wasn’t that far off from something we would do—but it felt very posh.” Then she adds with a laugh, “But I think I might start doing that.”

The traveler’s review of the WOW trip-planning system:

Paula had heard about Wendy Perrin through a friend and checked out our website. “I thought it looked straightforward and easy to deal with,” she says. “And the people I chatted with—it all seemed pretty tight. And someone else does the planning.” That appealed to her greatly, she says: “I don’t have that expertise, and I don’t want to spend the time building that expertise. I’d rather just hand it over to someone else who does know—and that worked well because it’s not just booking a flight, it’s booking different places.” Thinking back to before she found WendyPerrin.com, Paula laughs and says, “We were trying to plan what to do with eight weeks, and almost needed a divorce lawyer, because we had to work though a lot of stuff, prioritizing people’s wants and needs, and working through a lot of logistics, with three children.”

“People asked me why didn’t you just use VRBO. I don’t want to land and be surprised, and if there is a surprise, I want someone else to deal with it. This wasn’t meant to be cost-effective. We don’t get sabbaticals often, so I didn’t want to get into a situation of I took a less expensive route and then I’m paying for it on my holiday.”

 

Wendy Wants To Amp Up Your Trip!

On every third qualifying trip, Wendy will add to your itinerary a surprise WOW Moment. A WOW Moment is an exclusive insider experience that helps make a trip extraordinary. Each WOW Moment is totally different. They vary depending on a huge range of factors, including the country you’re headed to, the timing of your trip, logistics, availability, and more. You can read a sampling of the more over-the-top WOW Moments (those most conducive to editorial coverage) here. Learn which trips qualify, and how the process works, here: Wendy Wants To Amp Up Your Trip!