I participated yesterday at the Wharton China conference in in Philadelphia and then ran to DC for an evening event, and now back in New York ready to fly home to China.

The staff at Wharton put together a great mix of corporate and academic folks with China interests. I was joined on my panel by Richard Roberts, VP Communications at Wyndham (disclosure: we service all of Wyndham's hotel brand assets in China); Prof Qu from Oklahoma State; and Prof Li from University of South Carolina — Prof Eliashberg from Wharton's Marketing Dept was the moderator. Prof Li had previously worked for 5 years in Nanjing with the government's tourism bureau, and both he and Prof Qu have, separately, developed a number of key studies that are being used for things like the roll-out this year of the ADS travel agreement between China and the US. Once that gets done, US destinations are planning big marketing campaigns to entice outbound Chinese.

The best thing about speaking to MBA students is that they usually ask higher level questions than would be asked at a normal industry conference in China, or elsewhere. And with the quality of trained hospitality staff in China diminishing very quickly as construction of new hotels outrun the number of new hospitality grads, I hope some of those students decide to drop their potential consulting gigs at firms like Bain and go into the hospitality sector — trained business-minded people are sorely needed.