Independent
Beijing
If this isn’t the best boss in the world, we’d like to know who is. A generous Chinese boss has treated 6,400 of his employees to a holiday in France at a cost of £24m.
Li Jinyuan, the billionaire owner of Tiens Group, a multinational giant, booked 140 hotels in Paris for more than half of his 12,000 workers, who were treated to tours of sites, including the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, and a trip to the Côte d’Azur.
Mr Li booked 7,600 train tickets on France’s high-speed TGV trains to ferry his employees to the south coast, where about 4,760 rooms were booked in four and five star hotels in Monaco and Cannes.
Ending the holiday, to celebrate the company’s twentieth anniversary, the workers travelled to Nice, where they spelt out “Tiens’ dream is Nice in the Côte d’Azur,” which was confirmed as the “longest human-made phrase” by Guinness World Records.
It took 147 buses to transport the entire group from their hotels to the promenade in Nice. It is expected that the tour group, the single-largest to ever visit France, will have spent 33m euros on their all-expenses-paid trip.
Tourism accounts for seven per cent of France’s GDP and is worth 150bn euros a year. In 2013 84.7m foreign tourists visited the country, making it the most popular destination in the world.
The Tiens conglomerate operates in a range of sectors, including biotechnology, logistics, finance and property. It was founded in 1995 by Mr Li, who is the 24th richest person in China, according to Forbes, which estimates his wealth at $1.2bn.