‘Industrial sized’ holiday caters for 6,400

The billionaire chief executive of the Chinese conglomerate Tiens has given 6,400 of his salespeople a holiday that started in Paris and ended with a parade on France's Cote d'Azur.

They filled the streets of Paris and the beaches of the Cote d’Azur. Clad in blue T-shirts and waving flags, they descended on the Louvre en masse. On the sand in Nice, they broke a world record for the longest human-formed sentence visible from the sky.

The group enjoyed a four-day trip to France and Monaco last week courtesy of their multi-billionaire owner, who booked 84 airplanes, more than 200 entire hotels and dozens of trains on a vacation to celebrate the company's 20th anniversary.

The trip was an economic bonanza for the French tourism industry, said Thomas Deschamps, the head of research at the Paris Tourism Office, who called it an "industrial-size event." He estimated that the Tiens Group and the tourists had spent $13.5 million (€12 million) on hotel rooms, transportation, meals and shopping for luxury items. About three-quarters of those who work for the company made the trip.

“It is clear that visits such as these are good for France,” Mr Deschamps said. “It shows that Paris has the know-how to host big business conferences, even as it was a challenge to receive and host them all at the same time.” The arrival of the small army of tourists was particularly welcome after recent reports of brazen robberies of Chinese tourists in the French capital, which have fanned concerns in the French tourism industry that the Chinese might skip Paris in favor of other destinations.

But in China, the trip was an embarrassment to some, who saw in the spectacle a sales ploy, even a Maoist-style political campaign to achieve a contemporary Chinese goal: making money.

Calling it "military tourism," Tao Duanfang, the pen name of Tao Yong, a self-declared Francophile who writes on culture, development and tourism, wrote in The Beijing News that the West was being fooled.

The headline of his guest commentary was "The World's Largest Tour Group Wasn't Just for the Amusement of the French."

“This definitely wasn’t just a rest or a holiday, but a ‘work trip’ or a ‘struggle,’” he wrote, using a common Chinese political term.

The Tiens Group, a direct-sales company, says it reaches consumers in 190 countries and deals mostly in health food, health care appliances, skin care and household products. At a meeting in Nice with French officials, however, company executives said they were interested in expanding into French wine, restaurants, perfume, fashion and art, according to a report by Xinhua, the state-run news agency. The company says it also owns a university and a health research center in China.

Tiens has been accused of playing on dreams of riches, and at least one account, from Uganda, on the Think Africa Press website, said it promotes dubious remedies for serious illnesses. After leaving Paris, thousands from China and other countries where the conglomerate is active, like Indonesia, formed a giant sentence on the beach in Nice: "Tiens' Dream Is Nice in the Cote d'Azur." Their effort earned a Guinness world record for the longest human-formed phrase visible from the sky.

Li Jinyuan (57) the company's founder, was photographed standing in an open-top, military-style jeep.

Mr Li is worth about $5.8 billion, according to the Hurun Report, which publishes a list of the richest people in China. The company's worth could not immediately be confirmed from its website.

Contacted by telephone, an employee in Beijing, who declined to give his name because he was not authorised to speak with the media, said sales representatives obtained products from the headquarters or local branches.

They sell them personally or at stores they open themselves, he said, estimating that there are 5,000 such stores in China alone. Representatives have no base salary but earn a commission.

“The more we sell, the higher the commission,” he said.

NYT