This may come as a shock to my readers, but I do not speak Mandarin.
One of our clients has numerous travelers from various parts of Asia, with high volumes of travelers from China. My company had helped plan a trip to Florida for a Chinese group. The group had spent several days in Cancun and Playa del Carmen before that, but we hadn’t planned either of those parts of the trip.
I’m still unclear on how it happened, but someone was supposed to schedule a Chinese-speaking host for these trips, and that never happened. Worse, the mistake was discovered less than 24 hours prior to the start of the trip.
When we learned about it, my boss and I were out with friends and had to drop everything to figure out how to get a host to Cancun within the next 12 hours. My co-worker was going to be hosting the Florida portion of the trip, so it made the most sense to send her, but she was visiting friends in another city and didn’t have her passport with her. I was the next best option, so we found an insanely high-priced plane ticket, and early the next morning, I was on my way to Cancun.
One of the other bits of preparation we did was to find a local translator. Our local DMC (Destination Management Company) helped us track one down, and we made quick arrangements for the translator to arrive at the hotel at 2 PM to help me greet people and get everyone checked in.
Usually, we arrive on-site one day prior to most of the guests so we have time to double-check anything and correct any issues. In this case, I was arriving just a few hours before the guests. I worked as much as possible on the plan, sending rooming lists, checking flight manifests, arranging meetings with the hotel, etc. After landing at around 11 AM, I was on the phone immediately with the DMC confirming that afternoon’s transfers.
When I arrived at the hotel, I had the fastest pre-conference meeting with a hotel that I’d ever had and rushed to my room to attempt some sort of translation of my Itinerary to Mandarin. Google Translate is not a great tool for this, and my translations were rough at best.
Another coworker of mine had recently told all of us about WeChat, a Chinese-designed messenger app that translated in real-time to and from Chinese to several other languages, including, of course, English. I made sure to download the app and get familiar with it before guests started arriving.
When my translator arrived at 2, he and I went over the itinerary to fix the glaring issues and try to get it in a little bit better shape. None of the translations were so far off they weren’t understandable but “host” translated to something closer to “maid” and “Welcome Reception” had translated to “Hello Party”. One fun one that the translator and I discussed for a while was “cenote”. A cenote is the Spanish word for a limestone sinkhole common on the Yucatan Peninsula. The best translation we could come up with was “water cave.” Mandarin is hard enough to translate when you speak it fluently. It’s even hard to get it accurate when you’re a machine.
By about 3 PM, an hour after our usual SLA (Service Level Agreement) to have a welcome desk up and running, I was ready with translated itineraries and a QR code for guests to add me to WeChat easily.
Fortunately, the group was arriving on two different flights, both of which landed after 3 PM. Unfortunately, the one with more guests on it, landed around 7 PM, meaning my pre-scheduled 7 PM welcome reception was going to be a bit of a bust.
I muddled through the check-ins with an apologetic smile on my face. My translator was somewhat helpful, but his Chinese was not quite fast enough to keep up with the guests, so most of the time, WeChat wound up being a better option. As it turned out, the guests had already created a WeChat group and were happy to add me to it. This made it easy for me to provide information all at once to the entire group, and if the translation software wasn’t working well enough, there was one English-speaking traveler who was able to provide a better translation when necessary.
Between WeChat, my translator, and a whole lot of smiling, I was able to get through a couple of days of sharing no common language until my co-worker arrived. I gave her as many tips as I could for communicating with the group, then headed home.
It wound up being a pretty easy trip. The hotel was a Hard Rock property, which is known for excellent service and one of my favorite properties to work with because of their over-the-top preparedness. All the transportation was provided by a company we used regularly, and everyone involved bent over backward to help me out with the group. The only challenge was the language barrier, and most of the group, with a few exceptions that I’ll discuss in another post, were very understanding, and we all did our best to communicate with each other, with a decent amount of success. I viewed this episode as an interesting problem-solving challenge and learned all sorts of great ways to handle a similar issue in the future.
