China Highlights

Diana our guide and Mr Shen our private driver were fantastic. Our first time to China and Beijing, Diana Mr Shen made our trip seamless with perfect drop-offs and pick ups and a wealth of knowledge provided by Diana on all the local cultural sites. This made our family trip all the better as it was completely stress free with so many wow moments. Show details

Nina was an amazing guide. So contentious of our well being and informative for so much history, culture and local information. She planned our days together with wisdom, insights and practicality. So amazing. If we could give more stars we would. Show details

A fabulous journey to the Far West of China ! Tashkurgan is amazing ! We had a wonderful driver, the car was very confortable. I highly recommand China Highlights and will trave with them again, for sure ! Show details

Our trip to Chengdu was amazing. This was made possible by our wonderful guide Eric and reliable driver Mr Qui. Eric was very knowledgeable, took great care of us, helpful and fun to be with. Thankyou so much, you made our time in Chengdu a wonderful memory.

One day trip in Chengdu was with nice guide Jason. We visited many lovely pandas, interesting points and Jason always took good care of us. He also brought us to a traditional teahouse off‑schedule to learn the rules of Chinese game mahjong. Jason is excellent! Show details

Helen from China Highlights in Chengdu was our tour guide. She is very knowledgeable of the sites we visited. Our itinerary was changed according to the group dynamics and she even arranged an extra tour for us. Helen is vibrant, energetic and passionate about her work. Thank you Helen for a memorable experience Show details ·  1

- This review covers the last day of a 12-day tour in the region organized as a private tour with China Highlights - We had a great experience throughout the trip and our last stop at Chongqing was the icing on the cake! China Highlights does a great job in making sure you are well-taken care off and feel like a VIP. We had a delightful day trip… Read more ·  1

around Chongqing and we will be back for a longer stay. Chongqing was our last destination for our departing flight back home and so we had planned only a 1-day stopover. But it was a fantastic one-day with our lively and lovely guide Amy. She was enthusiastic and gave us a great introduction to Chongqing. She knew we had only one day and she made sure that we hit the major sites - all well-executed in conjunction with our personal driver who dropped us off and picked us up in practically military precision. We wasted no time in moving from one place to another.

We visited Shibati (Eighteen Stars), Kuixing Building, Hongyadong, Liziba, Ciqikou, Liberation Times Square, Top of the WFC and Raffles City Chongqing. Besides seeing some of the major touristy sights we were also given an opportunity to enjoy the "host project" which was a walk through the local community to see how the residents of Chongqing live and to experience the local flavour and environment. We particularly enjoyed that as it gave us great perspective on the progress of Chongqing and how far it has come in just 3 decades. AMAZING. We also got to enjoy a lot of local food at local establishments which were all well-recommended by Amy.

And for the grand finale in the evening, Amy arranged for us a river cruise at 8pm. She knew there was the once a month drone display in the night sky that starts at 8.30pm that (Saturday) evening and specifically arranged VIP tickets for us on the cruise so that we sat upfront at the top of the boat without the crowd to enjoy the great scenery and show.

Amy was with us from the start to the end of the day to make sure nothing went wrong. And this was especially important to me as I was travelling with my 80+ old mum who needed some help in moving around.

The whole day was well-coordinated, efficient and comfortable! Amy is an outstanding tour guide. We will be back!

Video review on Marianne our guide who is highly recommended. Show details

We had the pleasure of having Gary Wei as our tour guide for our visit to Guilin and he has made the trip very relaxing, comfortable, and fun! He is very passionate about his job and loves to share about the places you are visiting and about the history as well. He puts a lot of attention on ensuring we never lose or forget anything, and was… Read more ·  1

always very punctual with the driver and our timeline. Out of our 4 stops in China so far, Guilin was the most enjoyable and it was largely due to Gary!

He made great suggestions of where to go and what activities we should do. Although we had locations set, he had great knowledge of local activities and eats.

We hit the reed flute cave, the Li river cruise tour, Yangshou countryside the old town of Daxu, and the Elephant Trunk Hill. Our favourite was biking around the countryside of yangshou and the old town of Daxu!

If you can request a guide, I would 10/10 recommend you ask for Gary every time!

Jennie our guide was excellent. Very professional and efficient. She surpassed our expectations. Show details ·  1

We thoroughly enjoyed our 18-day trip to China visiting places including Yunnan, Sichuan, Xi'an. Overall, the staff were friendly, professional, and catered to our requests / needs throughout the trip. In particular, we want to thank: a) Our tour guide in Chengdu, Cecilia Zhang, who was outstanding. She was very well prepared with information on… Read more

the city and each attraction, spoke English well, was flexible to our needs (e.g. how long we wanted to stay at the Panda base), and managed the itinerary and timing as our requests evolved during the day for example suggesting an extra visit to the People's Park in the afternoon when we had spare time which allowed us to experience the local people's tea culture. b) Our travel consultant Leeky who planned the overall itinerary and tailored this to our requests and feedback. She was responsive throughout the planning stage, and also during the trip we appreciated how quickly she responded outside business hours to resolve an unexpected issue with our car.

Had the best experience with Jason as our tour guide. Jason is very professional and knowledgeable, gave us explaining the deep and rich history of the region. He and driver have been always available and kind. All the activities respected our needs, especially he took us to Emei mountain and gave us lots of suggestions for the hotel hot springs… Read more

which were very refreshing. He taught us how to play mahjong in the local tea house, which is the most popular game in the area and very interesting.

We recently travelled to Beijing via China Highlights to celebrate my mum’s 70th birthday and we had the most wonderful trip thanks to our lovely and thoughtful guide Angela Cheng! Angela was so helpful and flexible in making changes to our itinerary on short notice to help provide a more relaxing and rich experience which was personalised our… Read more

interests. We only had about 3 days but we visited many sites including the Great Wall of China and local farms around the wall, Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, Shachihai Hutongs, Temple of Heaven, Jingshan Hill. Angela arranged for us to visit an incredibly outstanding acrobatic performance which we thoroughly enjoyed as well. We felt so comfortable and had good laughs and really enjoyed her company as well as the stories of Chinese folklore & history. Thank you Angela for the most amazing time from all of us!!! - Paul & Family

We absolutely loved Chengdu, and a huge part of what made our experience so special was our wonderful guide, Cecilia. She is not only extremely professional and knowledgeable, but she also shared unique stories and insights that allowed us to truly immerse ourselves in the local culture. She taught us how to play Mahjong at People’s Park, helped… Read more

us arrange our Sichuan Opera experience, accompanied us to Shuyanfu, and was there to help with every little detail throughout our stay.

Cecilia is genuinely the best guide we have ever had and we feel incredibly lucky to have had her with us. She made us love China even more and made our time in Chengdu even more memorable.

Thank you for everything, Cecilia ❤️ And a special mention for the driver too!

Back in July 2025 a friend casually suggested that a visit to Chongqing China – a city I had not heard of before but is actually the world’s most populous city – might be fun. The suggestion piqued my interest and started me on a search to find a travel agency that could design a trip for me. I rather quickly came upon the travel company China… Read more

Highlights that offered packaged tours of a number of China locations, and also offered the ability to customize their tours to enable visits to personally desired locations. So I looked at their primary tour locations and identified ones that I was most interested in. Then I contacted China Highlights and submitted my list to them. A short time later I was contacted by agent CHANDLER WANG who proceeded to draft a detailed tour that would take my wife and I to all the locations I had identified. Chandler was great to work with, answering all of my questions and designing and pricing a detailed three week tour for us. As this was a custom created tour – which is actually China Highlights’ specialty – the quoted price covered just my wife and I. Chandler advised that I could invite any number of additional family or friends to join the tour and the per person price would be reduced from economies of scale. The tour was rather unique in that it did not include some of the most well known destinations in China as my wife and I had previously visited those on our first China trip in 2008. I showed this custom tour to a number of people and two of our adventurous friends elected to join us midway through our itinerary.

Flash forward 14 months to 8/31/2026 when we finally departed on our exciting vacation. Things got off to a rocky start when we arrived in Chengdu and we learned that my checked suitcase was still in Seattle Washington! Thank goodness for our remarkable local guide HELEN, who met us at Chengdu airport and took over our quest to recover my suitcase; speaking the Chinese language Helen was able to regularly follow up with the airline to ensure that my suitcase would be sent to us across the 6000+ miles and delivered to me at our Chengdu hotel. We are so thankful to Helen for this!

A word about the hotels that China Highlights selected for us. Despite a caveat that was stated in our tour documentation that we may find that some hotels in the less populated areas may not match the high standards of the hotels in the larger cities, I must say that each and every hotel selected for us was outstanding! All included wonderful breakfast buffets featuring western items like eggs and bacon and that got each day off to a well-nourished start… including our meals on our three day Yangtze River cruise ship, the brand new Vista Aurora.

Trying to describe each of our amazing experiences on this three week tour would require a novel, so I’ll attempt to limit it to key “highlights” (pun intended). Back to Helen in our first destination city of Chengdu: although we had emerged from customs and immigration at Chengdu Tianfu Airport near midnight she and her driver Ms Gau were there at that late hour greeting us with their smiling faces. Helen was a wonderful, knowledgeable tour guide. She escorted us to Chengdu’s magnificent Panda Research Center, to the pagoda at the top of Mount Qingcheng and to other locations in our itinerary. Most notably Helen taught us to play mahjong at an elaborate electronic playing table near the tea house at Chengdu’s People’s Park; an utterly enjoyable experience!

Helen accompanied us to the train station and stayed with us until we safely boarded our high speed train to Chongqing. Chandler had ensured that we had comfortable first class reserved seats on every train necessary to complete our full itinerary and that all were high-speed trains. JENNIE met us with a cheerful smile when we arrived at the train station in Chongqing. She was so helpful in showing us around per our scheduled itinerary. There was a little misunderstanding on the timing of our visit to the Hongya Caves on the day we arrived; she initially had taken us there in the daytime while our itinerary said that it would be a nighttime visit. Jennie told us that she hadn’t been provided with that information, so it appears that someone had missed that detail in our itinerary. Jennie was very apologetic and she escorted us back out in the evening for a wonderful view of the Hongya Caves at night plus a special aerial drone show happening a short walking distance nearby. While with us, Jennie went above and beyond to offer us anything that we might want or need; at our request she placed orders for me to obtain a great phone charger power pack and also two handheld fans for my wife and I to help beat the heat. Jennie and her driver Mr Liu also took us to the magnificent Three Natural Bridges area, the amazing Flying Kiss attraction (sadly not operational during our visit but at least we saw it and took some great photos) and she told us about the “Impression Wulong” outdoor nighttime show (overseen by famed director Zhang Yimou) which we immediately asked to see; Jennie made all the arrangements for us to attend. Likewise she also told us about the world famous “1949 Chongqing” production and once again she made all the arrangements for us to attend; it was an amazing show!

After a farewell drink together atop Chongqing’s Intercontinental Hotel, Jennie took us to the embarkation location for the Vista Aurora, our Yangtze River cruise ship, and followed us onboard and ultimately to our cabin to ensure we were OK. Our heartfelt thanks to Jennie for everything she did for us. I would be amiss if I didn’t mention the splendid service provided by our drivers in every location. Our itinerary required a good deal of driving and all of our drivers handled this responsibility both efficiently and safely.

Our three days sailing the Vista Aurora was very enjoyable. The highlight (there’s that word again) for us was an evening visit to the spectacular outdoor show “War Fire of the Three Kingdoms”, which was replete with real horses, moving sets, fire, water and revolving grandstand seating. Another highlight was passing through the ship locks at Yichang during our final cruising day.

Disembarking our cruise ship we joined our friends Sam and Tamara at the Three Gorges Visitor Center and were greeted by local guide SALLY who arranged a wonderful lunch for us all. Sally then set us on our way with a driver who drove us to our next destination, Wulingyuan in Zhangjiajie province.

EILEEN was there to warmly greet us as we arrived in the late afternoon at our hotel in Wulingyuan. Over the next three days she was our very capable guide as we visited Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, where we saw the stark mountains that inspired James Cameron for his film “Avatar”, also the glass bridge over Zhangjiajie’s Grand Canyon where we had the highest zip line ride we’ve ever had (!), then the striking Yellow Dragon caves and, after driving to the city of Zhangjiajie, a scenic cruise of Baofeng Lake, a visit to Tianmen Mountain and the 999 steps to the Gate of Heaven. On our second evening and at our request she arranged for us to attend a dinner and show at Wulingyuan’s “Romance Park”, which was a unique and enjoyable experience.

Eileen helped us through all of our arrangements and rail transportation to our next destination of Huangshan. There we met our local guide JASON who, on the following day, escorted us to the beautiful Yellow Mountains. I don’t think I have ever climbed up and down so many steps, first to arrive at our mountain hotel and then to experience the truly awesome sunset and next morning sunrise from the mountaintop viewpoints. Needless to say, all of the strenuous climbing was well worth it. Departing the Yellow Mountains, we visited two historical villages designated UNESCO World Heritage sites, Hongcun and Xidi, each dating back close to a thousand years. Jason was a wonderful guide to have throughout these locations.

As with all guides, Jason ensured that we safely boarded our next trains, destination Xianju. There we were greeted by local guide AVOCA (like “avocado” he jokingly told us). Avoca took us to one of my personal favorite places in our itinerary: Shenxianju, home of the Immortals. The Immortals are the gods of Chinese literature, and this scenic mountain area provided incredible vistas, cliffside walkways, bridges spanning deep canyons, and a high glass viewing platform.

Avoca saw us on our way to the major port city of Guangzhou (formerly Canton) where we met TOMMY, our final local guide. On our last full day Tommy gave us a walking tour of old town Guangzhou, including a visit to the home of Bruce Lee’s parents which has been converted into a museum showcasing Bruce’s notable and tragically short life. Then per our itinerary, he took us to the Gulong Gorge Adventure Park that featured and a Jurassic Park-like dinosaur theme, scenic waterfalls and of course a high glass skywalk. This skywalk had previously featured a visual effect that simulated the glass cracking as one stepped on it – something I was looking forward to experiencing – but alas within the last several years the effect was removed from all China skywalks that had featured it due to the trauma allegedly experienced by some visitors. Next we drove twenty minutes to experience the Gulong Gorge glass bridge in both late afternoon and after sundown, when a waterfall emerges from the high bridge and changing color lights on the water create a marvelous sight. Tommy was perhaps our most knowledgeable guide and we appreciated our enlightening conversations and all the information we learned from him.

The next morning Tommy and his driver saw us to Guangzhou airport for our return trip to the United States. We cannot express enough thanks to China Highlights, Chandler Wang and to all of our local guides and drivers for what for us was the China Trip of a Lifetime!

My husband and I stayed in Beijing for 3 nights as part of a 3-week China tour custom designed by Vivi of China Highlights. In Beijing our visits to major cultural and historical sites are informative, memorable, and enjoyable. Our guide Angela Cheng is knowledgeable, professional, flexible, fun, and had shown great care of her clients. Through… Read more ·  1

her smart problems solving skills, she made the client with dietary restrictions very happy with each meal, and managed to bring the client with some walking difficulty to the Great Wall. We deeply appreciate Angela’s hard work and attention to detail, and China Highlights for this wonderful experience.

Fantastic memorable stay in Chengdu. Our guide Joe was absolutely brilliant, organised, knowledgeable and enthusiastic. Very experienced and even taught us how to play Sichuan mahjong. We had the best experience seeing the pandas, visiting early to catch them eating and active.We visited the Dujiangyan irrigation system- there is also a beautiful… Read more ·  1

garden there. We climbed Mt QingCheng to see the birth place of Daoism and saw lovely scenery. A boat trip to the LeShan Giant Buddha was amazing and after climbing up to Buddhas head we then visited the temple and pagoda. Finally we visited one of the Peoples Parks, so beautiful and full of active happy people and the tea shop. The food in Chengdu was delicious and Joe was really helpful about choosing representative SiChuan cuisine for us , without any pain, just great flavour. Our driver Mr Qing was excellent and smooth in negotiating the Chengdu traffic , kind and so polite. We weren’t sure what to expect of Chengdu, but it greatly exceeded our expectations and we did not want to leave. All our logistics were seamless . China Highlights keeps on delivering an awesome experience. On to Chongqing!

Chengdu is our most important stop on the trip, all thanks to its giant pandas. Our tour guide Jason arranged the panda‑themed tour perfectly. We visited the panda base right when the pandas were most active, and there were hardly any crowds. The whole experience was beyond our expectations. Jason is knowledgeable and patient. He answered every… Read more ·  1

question we raised and had a great sense of humour. Amazingly, he knew almost every panda there and could tell a unique story for each one.

After watching the pandas, Jason took us to a local mahjong parlor. Mahjong is the most beloved game in Chengdu. He taught us how to play and introduced us to local people. We played together with them. It was truly an unforgettable experience.