Guy Rubin of Imperial Tours Discusses Modern China and Luxury Travel
Publication: Lisa the Travel Girl / Artist First Radio Network
Interview: Guy Rubin of Imperial Tours Discusses Modern China & Luxury Travel
Host: Lisa K
This interview originally aired on Lisa the Travel Girl on the Artist First Radio Network and is republished with permission as part of Imperial Tours’ media archive.
Guy Rubin of Imperial Tours Discusses Modern China & Luxury Travel
Guy Rubin, co-founder and managing partner of Imperial Tours, joins Lisa K of Lisa the Travel Girl to discuss modern China, luxury travel, and the remarkable changes he has witnessed during nearly three decades of living and working in the country.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Guy shares the story behind Imperial Tours, how he and his wife Nancy Kim built one of the leading luxury tour operators specializing in China, and why immersive cultural experiences remain at the heart of meaningful travel. The discussion explores how China has evolved over the years, common misconceptions held by Western travellers, the country’s rapid modernization, regional cuisine, high-speed rail, Hong Kong, Korea, and what visitors can expect when exploring China today.
Hosted by luxury travel consultant Lisa K, Lisa the Travel Girl showcases exceptional destinations, travel industry insights, and conversations with leading travel professionals from around the world. With more than 20 years of experience creating bespoke travel experiences and visits to over 35 countries, Lisa brings a unique perspective to every interview, helping travellers discover new destinations and travel opportunities.
Originally produced by Lisa the Travel Girl / Artist First Radio Network and reposted with permission.
Interview Transcript
Announcer: Welcome to another broadcast of Lisa the Travel Girl on the Artist First Radio Network. As a former NFL cheerleader, longtime radio personality, and experienced world traveller, here she is: Lisa the Travel Girl.
Lisa K: Hi, everybody. It’s time to pack your bags and press play. You’re about to take off with me, Lisa the Travel Girl, where every episode is a new stamp on your passport. From hidden gems to epic adventures, I bring the world to your ears on the third Thursday of every month. Tonight, we are talking about the beautiful and mysterious country of China with Guy Rubin, who founded the fabulous Imperial Tours with his wife, Nancy. Welcome, Guy.
Guy Rubin: Thank you so much, Lisa. I’m really happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Lisa K: We have to talk about it. We just met last month in China, and your company is off-the-charts fabulous. Everything with Imperial Tours was top notch. Everything was perfect. There was nothing I would change. So tell me how you and Nancy got into this business.
Guy Rubin: I met Nancy, who is Korean American, while I was studying Chinese in Beijing. I am Israeli-English, and we met in a Chinese language class on February 17, 1997. She was sitting in the front row on the right-hand side. About two and a half years later, on October 1, 1999, we started a luxury travel business, even though neither of us had worked in travel before beyond being travellers ourselves.
Guy Rubin: We were 27 at the time. I came from a financial background and had been working in the City of London as a strategy consultant. I was used to entering new markets and doing the research needed to help multinational companies open them. Nancy, meanwhile, was an archaeologist. She was about to pursue her third postgraduate degree in a very niche area of archaeology: seventh- to tenth-century celadon. She had already studied in South Korea and was quite rare in that she was being invited to participate in a Chinese archaeological dig.
Guy Rubin: Archaeology can be a very nationalist field. People from other countries are not generally invited onto digs, but because of Nancy’s background, they were inviting her. She was improving her Chinese and learning classical Chinese to progress her academic career. At the same time, I was planning to do something completely different. I wanted to research listed Chinese multinationals, and I had tried to sell that idea to overseas investment banks.
Guy Rubin: While we were both pursuing our careers, people started visiting us in China. We discovered that what people thought about China and what we felt to be true about China were radically different. The options people had for travelling in China were also completely disconnected from what was actually possible there.
Guy Rubin: We were there at an incredibly rare and fortunate moment in China’s history: the economic liberalization and blossoming of China. The country was growing and progressing in so many areas. At that time, we also had access to Chinese society that we probably would not have had on merit alone. We were able to meet leading people in the arts and culture, many of whom are now incredibly famous in China.
Guy Rubin: Nancy has no memory of some of this, so I sometimes have to show her photographs of people we knew and remind her who we were sitting with in bars. It was an incredible time. But to return to your question, when people visited China then, they were often still following prehistoric itineraries that assumed China was poor, backward, or a cultural backwater. That was not the China we knew at all.
Guy Rubin: What we added was a bridge between the China people imagined and the China we were actually experiencing. That was the opportunity. Nancy eventually stepped away from archaeology after some academic politics around where she would study for her PhD. I was interested in starting a small business, and that is how Imperial Tours began.
Lisa K: Let’s talk about China now. I am almost ashamed to say that when we booked our trip, I was expecting China to feel backward or depressing. I was unbelievably happy and surprised. It was clean, people were happy, there were flowers everywhere, and the sights and landmarks were fabulous. People were asking me, “Oh my God, you’re going there?” But I never felt unsafe at any point. The people were polite and kind.
Lisa K: For someone going to China for the first time, what is the minimum amount of time you would recommend?
Guy Rubin: Most first-time travellers to China want to see Beijing, Shanghai, and Xi’an, where the Terracotta Warriors are located. Beijing is the historic capital of China and has been the capital for roughly six or seven hundred years. It has extraordinary monuments: the Great Wall near the city, the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, and many others. It is also a modern, vibrant city.
Guy Rubin: Shanghai is the most western-facing and business-friendly city in China. It is incredibly dynamic. The atmosphere is electric. When you are walking along the Bund and looking across the river at Lujiazui, you are in one of the most dynamic places on earth. I imagine walking in New York in the 1950s might have had a similar feeling.
Guy Rubin: Then many travellers want to see the Terracotta Warriors near Xi’an. Xi’an has received a tremendous amount of investment in recent years. Anyone who visited Xi’an before around 2017 or 2018 cannot possibly imagine what it is like now. It has changed radically. That is one of the most amazing things about China: it is always on the move. Since we arrived in 1997, every five years it feels like being in a new place.
Guy Rubin: People who have lived in China will understand this. You can live in Beijing or Shanghai, not visit a particular neighbourhood for seven or eight months, and then find it has completely changed because of construction and redevelopment. Nancy and I were privileged to be there at an incredible time in the country’s development.
Guy Rubin: To pick up on what you said about the gap between expectation and reality, I would say that the gap now is actually smaller than it has been at any time in the last 30 years that I have been involved with China. That gap has always existed, but people are starting to understand more about China because of what the country has achieved in areas such as artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, technology, and infrastructure. China is not only what the news media has often presented it to be. It is that, but it is also much more.
Lisa K: So how long should someone go? Would you say ten days? A week?
Guy Rubin: I have a vested interest in saying 30 days, but realistically China should be thought of more as a continent than a single country. At various times in its history, it has been a whole series of countries. It has extraordinary cultural richness. Most Americans visiting China come for around 14 days because it needs to be long enough to justify the journey. It is rare for a first trip to be less than 10 to 15 days.
Guy Rubin: That said, China has extraordinary depth. We do ultra-luxury travel for some of the most demanding clients in the world, and we have dealt with that level of traveller from the beginning. When we first walked into travel agents’ offices at 27, they wondered whether they should entrust their top clients to two people our age. But we have worked at the top of the market since day one.
Guy Rubin: I would say China has 30 days of amazing travel within it. We have a client coming in May who is the founder of a major multinational company. He is travelling with us for the second time and wanted to visit Jiuzhaigou. I recommended Chengdu instead for various reasons. When I began explaining what there was to do in Chengdu, he said he had never heard of the Leshan Buddha.
Guy Rubin: We do not even include the Leshan Buddha in the first two days of our Chengdu itinerary. But if the Leshan Buddha were in almost any other country, it would be one of that country’s top sites. It is a giant rock Buddha carved into a cliff face beside a river. It is an amazing sight, and yet Chengdu has so many other things to offer that it is not even necessarily central to our itinerary.
Guy Rubin: Chengdu also has extraordinary archaeological sites such as Sanxingdui. It was first discovered in the 1930s but was not extensively excavated until much later. They found extraordinary objects, including strange gold masks ranging in size from tiny to enormous. They also found jade, bronze trees, and many other objects from sacrificial pits. Most listeners will probably never have heard of Sanxingdui, and yet if it were anywhere else, it would be considered a national treasure. That is how culturally wealthy China is.
Guy Rubin: So when I say that a demanding luxury traveller could spend 30 days in China and see something amazing every day, I genuinely mean it. China is simply that rich.
Lisa K: I can attest to that. Where do most travellers to China come from? Do you get many Americans? Are they mostly from Europe, Australia, or Asia?
Guy Rubin: It has changed over time. Historically, China was a poorer developing country that entered the travel industry partly to earn foreign currency. When I first went to China, being a guide was a very good job because guides could earn dollars. In the 1980s, travellers came primarily from the United States and Western Europe.
Guy Rubin: As China has progressed, become wealthier, moved up the value chain, and become a technology leader in some areas, the mix of visitors has broadened. Economic and geopolitical ties play a major role. For example, we now receive travellers from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and other Middle Eastern countries in a way that we did not before.
Guy Rubin: America used to represent a much larger part of our business than it does now. That began changing around 2016, as the geopolitical relationship became tenser. Western Europe is still a sizable part of our business, but not as large as before. Meanwhile, other markets such as Brazil, Mexico, and the Middle East have stepped up their interest as economic relationships have developed.
Guy Rubin: I have had a difficult time over the past 30 years marketing China, and I think listeners can understand why. The geopolitical relationship between countries very much affects luxury travel. Individuals may say that politics does not affect their decisions, but in aggregate terms, it absolutely does.
Lisa K: After the pandemic, everyone wanted to go to Europe: Italy, France, all of that. But now many of those travellers have done that, and I am seeing more requests for exotic travel, including Thailand and Africa. I hope China is next. I have been all over social media talking about China because it was out of this world. It was so beautiful and amazing.
Lisa K: On our trip, I met up with you in Hangzhou.
Guy Rubin: Yes, halfway through your trip. I was so struck by how much Hangzhou has changed over the last 30 years. I first visited Hangzhou in 1992, which is quite a long time ago. It was beautiful, and we were lucky with the weather. It has progressed enormously.
Lisa K: Was Hangzhou the area that felt like Venice?
Guy Rubin: Exactly. It is another one of these destinations that many people have not heard of, but it is absolutely amazing. Marco Polo visited that area. It is blindingly beautiful.
Lisa K: Let’s talk about the food. Is the food different in different regions, or is it basically the same everywhere you go?
Guy Rubin: Chinese cuisine varies enormously by region. It used to be common to talk about four major schools of Chinese cuisine, but more recently some writers have argued that there are many more. There are definitely regional schools, and people sometimes approach Chinese food with concern that it will be difficult, extreme, or unfamiliar.
Guy Rubin: We have been dealing with overseas guests in China for more than 30 years, and when people travel with us, we design their meals. Someone chooses every meal in every restaurant so that guests are comfortable with the food while also sampling famous dishes in the places where they are most meaningful.
Guy Rubin: In Shanghai, there are famous pork dishes. In Beijing, there is Peking duck. In Hangzhou, you have lighter and sweeter flavours. There is a vegetable dish I love with aubergine and green pepper. In Hong Kong, there are Cantonese classics, from soups to roast duck and many other dishes. There is a wide range of food that American travellers can enjoy while also experiencing regional variety.
Guy Rubin: I also love breakfast in China. There are different breakfast foods across the country: rice porridge, millet porridge, Sichuan noodle dishes, fried dough dipped in soya milk in Shanghai, and dumplings in Hangzhou. Even something as simple as breakfast shows the variety of Chinese cuisine.
Lisa K: In Beijing, one of the hotels had a soup station in the morning with dumplings and bok choy. It was amazing. You also have the bullet train there for getting around.
Guy Rubin: China has built an extraordinary high-speed rail network. I cannot remember the exact statistic, but the scale of what China has built in recent years is astonishing. On your trip, you took the train between Beijing and Xi’an. We used to do that route by plane, and the total travel time can be similar. But I wanted travellers to see the Chinese countryside.
Guy Rubin: When you go to a country, cities can sometimes feel like cities anywhere. Where a country cannot hide itself is between cities. That is where you see the true wealth of a country and how developed it really is. On the high-speed train between Beijing and Xi’an, it is comfortable, and looking out the window gives you a sense of how much China has changed.
Guy Rubin: Many listeners might imagine paddy fields, water buffalo, shantytowns, and old images of China. What you actually see now are canals, high-voltage rail networks, towns, tended fields, and irrigation systems. It has changed so much within my lifetime.
Lisa K: Shanghai was amazing because one side of the river felt like a high-end Las Vegas, and the other side looked like Paris. It was incredible.
Guy Rubin: The buildings on one side were built roughly between the 1870s and the 1930s or 1940s. Some of the suites at the Waldorf Astoria Shanghai, for example, remind people of the Grand Palais in Paris. Then you cross the river and go up into a skyscraper more than 100 floors high, and you are looking down on other skyscrapers. It is mind-boggling, and it is always changing.
Lisa K: You will have to bring me back. I also want to go to Korea. I know Imperial Tours now does Korea as well, so maybe we can have Nancy on the show to talk about it.
Guy Rubin: Absolutely. We started Korea in 2024. Nancy is Korean American, and Korea is an amazing place in a very different way. One thing that is interesting about Korea from a Chinese point of view is that China went through the Cultural Revolution, which interrupted many traditional thought systems. Those systems carried on in South Korea.
Guy Rubin: Neo-Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and other traditions are still very much alive in Korea. We often think of Korea as a high-tech place, with companies such as Samsung, LG, and others leading in semiconductors, screens, and cars. But Korea is also incredibly spiritual. You can visit a Buddhist monastery, meditate there, and experience something extraordinary. There is Daoism, shamanism, and other traditions. Korea combines the technological and the traditional in a fascinating way.
Lisa K: Let’s talk about what we did that day. It was not yoga. What was it called?
Guy Rubin: Tai chi. That is a wonderful lifetime discipline. Susan and Morgan were with us in the group, and they had spent their lifetimes doing tai chi. They met through tai chi and taught it. When we were doing tai chi in Hangzhou, at the back of the Aman hotel on a platform beside the tea fields, I wondered what that moment meant to them. They had been practising for 40 years and were in China doing tai chi with a tai chi teacher.
Lisa K: What a life experience.
Guy Rubin: Exactly. Tai chi is related to Daoism. It is a physical exercise and also comes from a martial arts tradition. You may remember when the teacher asked everyone to try to push him and no one could move him. It is also a spiritual practice, closely related to meditation. You are moving energy through your body in a meditative state. We did it for an hour; others have practised it for decades. There are also other spiritual traditions that travellers can experience in China, including Daoist meditation.
Lisa K: Let’s talk about Hong Kong. If you are already in China, how long would you stay in Hong Kong? A couple of nights?
Guy Rubin: I would do a couple of nights in Hong Kong. The Peninsula Hong Kong is one of the great hotels of the world. I was once at a dinner in Las Vegas with some of the most important travel leaders in America, and when I asked their favourite hotels in the world, it was amazing how many named The Peninsula Hong Kong.
Guy Rubin: Whether you stay at The Peninsula or the Mandarin Oriental, both are historic hotels that symbolize Hong Kong in different ways. The Peninsula was built in 1929 and is now one of the oldest remaining buildings in Hong Kong because the city has so often torn down the old and built the new. The Mandarin Oriental is classic Hong Kong socially, with restaurants, bars, and traditions that remain important. There are also newer hotels such as the Four Seasons, Rosewood, and Upper House.
Guy Rubin: Hong Kong remains very sophisticated. It is still a place for fine dining, great bars, shopping, and nightlife. You see remnants of colonial Hong Kong around Victoria Harbour and Central, but you can also visit areas with more traditional Chinese beliefs, markets, flower markets, outlying islands, and even go by boat to see pink dolphins. It is a good pressure valve between the United States and mainland China, and it can be a useful way to break up the journey.
Lisa K: It is really not that hard to get to China from the United States. We flew through San Francisco to Beijing and returned from Shanghai through San Francisco. It was long, but it was worth it and not as difficult as people think.
Guy Rubin: I think the distance is often more political than geographic. In the past, some routes from the United States to China were shorter, but even now the flight time is manageable. China is absolutely worth it.
Lisa K: Before we wrap up, give us some final thoughts on China and tell us about Imperial Tours and what you do.
Guy Rubin: What we try to do is represent China as it is, not simply as it is often presented. We try to present China in the most enjoyable and best way imaginable. From the beginning, we wanted to present a country and culture that we loved in the best possible way. Travel never stands still. It is always evolving, and we are always developing new experiences.
Guy Rubin: Technology is now a major part of China, and people increasingly come not only to see the past but also to see a little bit of the future. I am currently putting together a technology tour in Shanghai where travellers will be able to do some amazing things.
Guy Rubin: One other thing I would like to say is how much Chinese people love America and Americans. In Chinese, America is called “the beautiful country,” and Chinese attitudes toward Americans are often very warm. Despite everything that has happened politically in recent years, on a personal level Chinese people continue to be warm and enthusiastic toward Americans. I think that is what you experienced.
Lisa K: Yes. Everyone was lovely, kind, and classy. There was nothing negative. Nobody questioned us. Everybody was just lovely. Guy, thank you so much for taking the time. I know you have been doing a lot of travelling and crossing time zones.
Guy Rubin: I am happy to be in the U.S. right now and able to speak with you at a normal time.
Lisa K: We will arrange for Nancy to come on so we can talk about Korea. Have a safe trip home. It was so nice meeting you. Please keep in touch.
Guy Rubin: Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for inviting me.
Lisa K: Thank you. Enjoy the rest of your time with your children. Bye-bye.
Lisa K: I want to thank everybody for joining us tonight. It was wonderful to talk about China. As I mentioned, I was there in March, and it was one of the most amazing trips of my life. I cannot say anything negative about it. Everything was beautiful: the hotels, the people, the food, the atmosphere. It was clean, it was safe, and it was lovely. It was worth the flight to get there. Have a wonderful evening, and I will talk to you next time.
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Imperial Tours specializes in bespoke luxury travel throughout China, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Korea. Contact us to discuss a custom itinerary tailored to your interests.