On the Chinese Internet there are always a few people who are negative about M1NT. I guess that’s normal for a successful private club, people tend to get jealous if they cannot be part of it and the Internet is a good way to show that. Some go a bit too far though, such as a Shanghai expat named Simon Tung. This 31-year old tried to spread false rumors on Twitter (@simontung) this week about M1NT being a scam and about some of the founders being arrested. He claimed to have ‘multiple sources’ telling him this and in a later tweet also mentioned ‘industry insiders’. At exactly the same time someone also tried to put a similar comment on a blog post of mine (anonymous of course, but because of the timing I would not be surprised if Simon was behind this). Why does he do this? Does he want to have his 5 minutes of ‘fame’? Or was he just rejected for a M1NT party? I don’t know, but if anybody can get me in touch with him I’d like to ask him myself.

But even though some people may not like M1NT Shanghai, a lot more do love it: The club was just voted Club of the Year in this year’s City Weekend’s Readers Choice Awards! I actually voted for M1NT as well, and even won a Spa session with that (Thanks City Weekend, I didn’t even know there were prices when I filled out the questionnaire). M1NT not only won Club of the Year, but in total they managed to get 5 of this year’s Awards. Next to Club of the Year, M1NT was also voted Best New Club, and it has the Best Bartender, Best Nightlife Bathroom and Best Cocktails. Congrats to the team at M1NT!

Update (May 9, 2009): Simon Tung contacted me after reading this blog post and sent me links that did not prove his allegations about M1NT being a scam. Regrettabley he was also not willing to name his sources as they are his friends. I also talked to the management of M1NT, and it appears that one of M1NT’s founding shareholders in the club in London and HK was arrested. However, this has nothing to do with M1NT and the person has no operational involvement in M1NT. M1NT has hundreds of shareholders and then there is always the risk that one of them could get into trouble. I will not allow any further comments bashing M1NT or its management on this blog. M1NT is doing very well and with success comes envy. C’est la vie.

Note: Normally I allow (almost) all comments as long as they are not spam, but comment moderation will be in place for this post. I am not looking to start a pro & contra war about M1NT here, I have had that discussion already too often both here and on other blogs.

After two not particularly positive blog posts in a row about KLM, now a more favorable one.

First of all, KLM started following me on Twitter after I wrote about some of my negative experiences with their website. The fact that they have a Twitter account (www.twitter.com/klm) shows they are using Social Media, which is a good thing for any company. And that they follow me, means that they also check what people write about them on Twitter. I did not follow them yet, so it’s not just a follow back.

Second, when I just checked in for my flight back to China I noticed that I had an upgrade to a business class seat. It sometimes happens that when you check in online that you can change your seat to a business class seat (when you are an Elite member of their frequent flyer program), but to my surprise my reserved seat had already been changed by someone to a business class. Coincidence? Probably. But if not: Thanks a lot @klm!

This is already my third upgrade this year on intercontinental flights that are operated by the KLM or one of their partners (2 from Europe to Asia and 1 from China to the USA), so maybe their frequent flyer program that I was negative about in my last post still has some value. It does not mean, however, that I agree to the fact that you only get 25% of miles on non-full fare tickets. Reconsider this change KLM, it gives loyal customers a bad taste when they spend a lot of money on flight tickets but do not get the miles for it. Even when it’s very difficult to spend those miles under your current frequent flyer rules!

While writing this I am somewhere above Russia on a flight from Shanghai to Amsterdam. After writing my last post about the problems I had to book a ticket on the KLM site my assistant finally managed to get me a seat on today’s flight. The economy class is still reasonably full (probably 60-70%), but the business class is almost deserted. There you really see the impact of the financial crisis, these planes used to be packed – both economy and business class.

My original plan had been to only fly to Europe once this month, for a short 4-day trip at the end of the month for a visit to Spil Games and to do three speaking engagements (at a “China Tafel” dinner at the Industrieele Groote Club in Amsterdam, at the Mediapark Jaarcongres (a media conference) and at the Nationale Marketingdag (National Marketing Day)). But because my grandmother died a few days ago I decided to go back this week as well for two days to attend her funeral.

When I tried to book the tickets for my late-June trip to Holland a couple of weeks ago the price was over RMB 16,000, which I found way too expensive. I decide to wait and see if the price would come down and worst case I would use another (cheaper) airline, although I did not really want to waste time by transferring to a different plane (KLM is the only airline with direct flights from Shanghai to Amsterdam) on such a short trip. When I checked the price for the 2-day trip this week I also got a price quote of more than RMB 16,000, which I found way too expensive. Sure, I would pay it if I had to, but there had to be a cheaper solution.

And indeed I found one: I combined the two trips and booked a ticket Shanghai-Amsterdam-Shanghai, with the date for the first leg today and the return flight at the end of June after my speaking gigs. The other ticket I booked was Amsterdam-Shanghai-Amsterdam, with departure date in two day and a return flight in late June for my second trip. Amazingly the total of the 2 flights was less than the price of just 1 of the original flights! Sure, there are more restrictions, but I don’t care. The original ticket was only available without restrictions, even though I would have preferred a cheaper restricted ticket.

Also I only get 25% of my miles instead of 100%, but even that’s not a big deal. At several occasions I tried to change my miles for flights, but I never succeeded. I think I have over 500,000 miles in my account that are basically worthless. I have the feeling KLM is trying to phase out its Flying Blue rewards program, only for expensive full-fare tickets you still get full miles and you lose them if you do not fly enough. In case you speak Dutch, read this article in De Telegraaf as well, which states that KLM is chasing away its loyal customers (especially the comments show what KLM frequent flyers think about the airline!).

I learned one thing: if I should do another short trip to Holland this year and the price is again so high, I am going to book two tickets like I did now. Even if I would not use the second leg on both tickets, it would still be cheaper. The KLM likely won’t give me any miles if I don’t take the return flights, but if you only get 25% anyway you might as well go down to 0 miles. Does any of my readers know if this strategy could somehow backfire? I mean, KLM will not be happy with an extra no-show, but is there anything else they could do?

I urgently need to fly to Holland this week, so last night I went to the klm.com site to book a return ticket from Shanghai. I also needed to book another return ticket from Amsterdam, so I decided to book that as well. At first everything went relatively well. The site was a bit slow, but that’s something I am used to when browsing the KLM site in China. Because the last time I used klm.com was in Holland it was still set to departure country Holland, so I first had to manually delete the cookies in order to get a departure city outside of the Netherlands.

I started by booking the flight Shanghai-Amsterdam-Shanghai. I selected the dates and the site told me there were tickets available for RMB 3800, amazingly low. I read about their special promotion for flights to Europe before, but did not imagine that they would still have tickets available a few days before departure. In the past I was always wary about these promotional prices, because lots of taxes and surcharges would be applied. But last year the Dutch government issued a law saying that airlines are not allowed to show prices without taxes and surcharges anymore. KLM was one of the first to publicly announce that they would follow this strictly. But not too strictly it turns out, because when I looked at the end price they added an additional RMB 2400 to the price! They have to make money, so I am not going to bash them for that, but I find it a bit misleading when they announce in Holland that all their prices are including taxes and surcharges, but when they don’t follow that if you log on from China. Anyway, so far so good.

When I selected the exact flights that I wanted to take (KLM has day and night flights from Shanghai and they also do code shares with Air France) I wanted to confirm my selection. And what happened? There was no confirmation button on the site! I refreshed it (which took another 2 minutes) and again the same problem. I decided to start all over again, but 10 minutes later I had the same problem, the site did not load any further. I could not proceed to do the actual booking. Why? Probably because KLM has no servers within China’s Great Firewall. That also explains why the site is so slow all the time, and why it sometimes does not load at all. KLM has probably no clue about this, because their staff never makes any online bookings themselves.

I decided to make the round trip booking from Amsterdam first. Because now I had a Dutch departure city the site and booking procedure were completely different. I wonder why? Would it not be much easier to have one booking engine? Anyway, I am not their CTO so I don’t know their internal reasons, but it does not seem like the most efficient way to build your website. The booking went easier than the flight booking from Shanghai, until I wanted to confirm the exact flying time. This time there was a confirmation button, but on the next page I got an Error 500 message (without any further error description, very user friendly…). I retried to do the whole booking and again had the same problems.

At the same time I started Twittering about it, and several of my followers replied with similar negative KLM experiences. I had a bit of fun about that, but was getting very angry at KLM’s amateurism at the same time. This whole thing had cost me almost an hour, and it’s not the thing I prefer to do at 10pm on a Saturday night. I finally tried to do the booking one more time, and this time it went through! Maybe less traffic on the site? I don’t know, but this time there was no Error 500 message. I paid with my KLM credit card and everything seemed to be confirmed, until I received a message that the credit card details were incorrect. Huh? I checked them all, but they were right. I use this card all the time and never have trouble, but when using the KLM card on the KLM site I get an error message? I tried it one more time, and again got the same message. On Twitter someone told me that KLM was having trouble with their payment partner, which may have caused the problem with my card. Could be, but why not let the customer know instead of only telling me my details are wrong.

I decided to give the Shanghai booking one more try, but here I failed again at the same point as before. On Twitter someone suggested to use the Air France site (KLM and Air France merged a few years ago), and that worked much better than the KLM site. But the AF site did not show any direct flights between Shanghai and Amsterdam! Amazing, if you want to fly from Shanghai to Amsterdam you are forced to fly over Paris, instead of taking the direct flight. At least the KLM site still shows the indirect Air France flights, but AF did not reciprocrate with the direct KLM flights.

I gave up and decided to give my parents a call. They are in Holland, and presumably the KLM site works better there. And that was the case. They could book the Shanghai-Amsterdam-Shanghai flight without any problem. Well, with one problem: my credit card details were once again refused. So they used their own card and the booking was confirmed. Then they booked the other flight for me, which went fine as well. Here they also had the option to pay by iDeal (a Dutch online banking tool) and the money was paid from my Dutch bank account. Don’t ask my why you cannot pay flights originating from outside Holland by online banking, and typical KLM: not customer oriented. Their own staff probably does not even know, because they never use the site themselves.

In total it took me 90 minutes, but then I had my reservations. KLM sent me a confirmation by email, but when I read it I got a surprise. Part of the message read:

If the card holder is not one of the passengers, card holder must fax the 2 sides of credit card used for ticket purchase, along with a valid picture ID & a signed attestation to KLM’s Sales and Service Center, 24 hours before departure (Fax no: 020 38785225). Please contact us to receive the attestation form. In Guangzhou and Shanghai, cardholder can also come personally to the airport the day of departure with his ID and credit card.

So my parents would have to fax all kinds of info to KLM together with an attestation form (for which no contact number was provided, by the way). Not only is that very customer unfriendly, but it was a problem as well, because my parents don’t have a fax machine at home. And because of a public holiday they could not go to a post office to fax either before I would fly. This made me even more angry with KLM. Why do they not warn you while booking? They just assume their customers accept anything? I fly KLM at least 10 times a year and I’m a Gold Elite member, but they treat me like a first-time customer who may be using a fake credit card. Come on guys, this is ridiculous.

After fuming about it for some time last night I decided to call the KLM hotline this morning. After being on hold for 10 minutes I finally got through and explained my story. I told them I would not able to provide the required information in time, and they told me I could not board the flight in that case. So what happened? I finally had no other possibility than to cancel my booking. So now I am back to where I started off, and I hope I can still get a seat on the flight to Amsterdam. Great job KLM, this is exactly how you should treat your most loyal customers in difficult economic times.

Update (June 3): Just received a letter from American Express, they blocked my KLM credit card because it had been used for an unusual transaction. I used it to pay for a big part of my wife’s c-section (tot
al over EUR 10,000), which was more than I normally spend. This was the reason the card did not work on the KLM site. Of course it just not change all the other complaints that I had 🙂

After giving birth to Elaine, my wife had to stay in the hospital for a few days. But today she was allowed to go home, so our family of 4 is now together in our house for the first time. It takes a bit of getting used to, when you suddenly have two kids in the house. Especially when they both decide to cry at the same time 🙂

Scott also needs to get used to Elaine a bit. He is a bit jealous that his parents are holding Elaine as well, and not only him. But I think he will get used to it quickly. He looks at Elaine a lot and even tried to touch her when she was laying in bed. Because he does not understand the difference between hitting and touching, we have to watch out that he does not unintentionally hurt her. Elaine has a small bed in the living room to lay in when she is awake during daytime, and when she is not in there Scott suddenly wants to play in there as well.

I am very happy to have the whole family at home now. It is a bit crowded, especially because we hired a nanny for Elaine as well (Scott also has his own nanny) and because my parent-in-law are visiting, but the house feels alive. Very different from just two years ago when it was just me and my wife, but I actually like it. Welcome home Elaine, you make your father very happy!

This morning my wife gave birth to our second child, a healthy daughter. Her full name is Elaine Claire van der Chijs, she was born on May 21, 2009 at 9:15 AM. Birth weight 3270 gram and a length of 51 cm. Both mother and baby are doing fine, but will need to stay at ParkwayHealth in Xintiandi for a couple of days to recover.

Just like when Scott was born in December 2007, I Twittered a bit before and after the delivery (not during the actual delivery, I was too nervous watching the whole procedure), an overview of the main tweets with the approximate times during the past hours:

6:45 AM Good morning Shanghai! Packing some things to take to the hospital, if everything goes wel’ll have a second child in a few hours!

7:15 AM Driving to ParkwayHealth, bit nervous but also happy. First time in my new car, good timing 🙂

7:15 AM Very busy on the highway into the city already, and it’s only 7:15AM. Hopefully no police yet, we’re driving without license plates.

7:25 AM Did a short video interview with my wife, she says she is not nervous for the delivery. Well, I am. We should be in hospital in 15 min.

7:45 AM In the hospital filling out all kinds of forms about the risks involved in a c-section. Does not make me feel more at ease to be honest.

7:50 AM My wife is now connected to the heart monitor. Our future baby’s heartbeat is 147, she must be nervous as well about her upcoming birth.

8:15 AM Things are going much faster than I imagined. My wife was taken to the operating room already for the epidural.

8:25 AM Going to the operating room myself now!

9:40 AM We have a healthy daughter! Elaine Claire van der Chijs was born at 9:15 AM, 3.270 kg, 51 cm. Happy!!!

10:30 AM Thanks everybody for the congratulation messages, too many to separately answer today. My wife and I read them all and are very happy!

11:15 AM Taking a short break from the hospital to drink a coffee in Xintiandi. Didn’t have time for coffee yet this morning 🙂

11:45 AM Put a few pics of my new daughter Elaine online just now at http://www.flickr.com/photo… Still cannot believe how quick it went today

A good friend of mine is planning to set up a wine bar in Shanghai. Although he is Chinese and pretty well connected, he has not been able to find a good property yet. He has been using Chinese agents, but they somehow seem to miss out on the best locations. During the past couple of months some new bars popped up in locations that he is looking for, but he did not hear about them on time. Most of these bars are run by foreigners, who seem to be able to scout these places before the Chinese agents do, which makes me wonder if there is some sort of hidden channel that I am not aware of?

If you know a good location for a wine bar, please drop me a line (email or comments) and I will put you in touch with him. What he is looking for:
– size 100-150 square meters
– location: French Concession or the area around the Portman Ritz-Carlton. If you know a place in a different location in Puxi not too far from big office buildings that might also be OK.
– price RMB 15,000-25,000

I am sure you’ll get a good bottle of wine if he finds the right place through you.

Picture (creative commons): Thomas Hawk

Last night Chinese instant messaging/gaming/social networking giant Tencent released it Q1’09 figures and they were once again impressive. I have been following Tencent for years and the company keeps amazing me with its figures. Also tech blogs outside China finally start to understand that what Tencent is doing in China is a lot more impressive than Facebook’s and MySpace’s figures, and that these two companies can learn a thing or two from China.

The Q1 revenue for Tencent was USD 366 million, 20% over Q4’08 and 75% over Q1’08. That’s already a major achievement in a global recession, but even more remarkable is where the revenues come from. Most non-Chinese social networks still rely for the majority of their revenues on advertising. Tencent, however, only had USD 21 million in advertising revenue, which is a decrease of 30% compared to Q4’08. USD 342 million came out of virtual items and microtransactions, and out of this amount and amazing 64 million USD was mobile value added services!

Tencent seems to be pretty much recession proof because of its micro-transactions, people keep on spending money on this even when the economy is not doing very well. The main reason is that people always want entertainment, even (or maybe especially) when the economy is getting hit by a global crisis. However, Tencent remains a bit cautious for the future: “The Company’s Internet and wireless value-added services, which are characterized by user-paid small ticket consumption items, have so far been rather resilient in the downturn, although the Company is uncertain of its performance should the economy continue to weaken for a prolonged period. “.

Their advertising income is not very important to the companies bottom line anymore, only about 6% of total revenue is advertising. So the fact that the ad income nosedived by 30% since the last quarter is not good, but the company does not really feel it. The company remarked: “The decline reflected lower advertising spending by customers as they imposed more cautious cost control measures, which include delaying the budget approval process and signing of framework contracts, under the uncertain economic environment.” They also note that for the rest of the year there is not a lot of visibility yet.

For Spil Games Asia I am seeing similar things. Meeting advertising income targets is a challenge, but income from virtual items and micro-transactions is growing very fast (we just started doing this and are now seeing growth rates of 20-30% per week). Mobile games are also doing well, but our main target for now is to grow our mobile audience and not yet to earn a lot of money from it. Our focus will be on monetization of games through micro-transactions, that’s where the real money is. But we won’t neglect advertising of course, both revenue streams will be important for us, especially for casual flash games.