New | Tailor-made tours: More Chinese ditching the package tour playbook for deeper cultural immersion

Art tours for the family in Singapore, vintage-car excursions in Monaco for guys, and visits to Japan’s cartoon museums for the kids. Tailor-made travel services are burgeoning in China as more holidaymakers seek unconventional experiences without the time-consuming preparations that usually come with them.

Judy Feng, a secondary school teacher in Shenzhen, used to spend months researching her holiday destinations and planning her itineraries, booking hotels, checking train and bus schedules and looking up the best local cafés to hang out at.

It didn’t take long for Feng, 42, to find it all too stressful dealing with the information overload, especially from the internet.

“To ensure a smooth trip, I would review photos of tourist attractions so many times that by the time I actually got there, I felt like I had lost all interest in them,” she said.

So in March, when Feng, her retired parents and her sister’s family decided on a 15-day summer vacation in Scandinavia, she decided to engage a Chinese-run tour company based in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. The result was a customised tour that cost less than 30,000 yuan (HK$36,000) per person, including accommodations and local transport, she said.

Feng is among a small but fast-growing number of experienced Chinese vacationers – mostly middle-class or wealthy from the first-tier cities – who are willingly to pay more for tailor-made tours. All the clients are required to do in preparation for their holiday is to select their preferred style and type of accommodation, transport and restaurants, and decide how and when to travel.