Wendy travelled almost from birth and experienced many contrasting environments in China while growing up. Her parents, as young, idealistic medical school graduates, had volunteered to help in the developing region of Tibet. Tibet was still very undeveloped and so Wendy was sent to stay with her grandparents in the Sichuan province, the home of the famous cuisine, Chengdu and the pandas!
 
She continued to live in Tibet, Shanghai and Jiangsu before attending university in Harbin, Manchuria.
 
But it was when she was working and attending college in Australia that the idea to start a travel company first came to her. She had planned to trip with her boyfriend to China, but two weeks before the trip he had to cancel.  Wendy was determined to still go, so she put an advert in the paper for a travelling companion. She was inundated with calls and it made her realise that there was a huge demand for travel to China. There and then she decided to explore the possibility of making travel to China a business.
 
Wendy approached a travel agency near the university proposing to sell tours to China. She told the manager she would do everything, take the orders herself and pay for the advertising. It was 1993 and the beginning of what was going to become a career in promoting travel to China.
 
In 1994 she sent her first group of travellers to China and she continued to send other groups there before opening her first office in Sydney.
 
People’s appetite for travel and adventure continued to grow and between 2001 – 2004 she added trips to Vietnam and India to her ever increasing portfolio.  By 2004 Wendy had also made the decision to open an office in London, a big milestone for Wendy.
 
The British travel public loves Wendy Wu Tours because, simply, they really know Asia; every vibrant, fascinating and incredibly rich corner of it which is why they are now the UK's leading specialist tour operator to China, Japan and Southeast Asia.
 
With over 700 departures across 100 different tours, Wendy’s business has come a long way since her first tours, plus the business now has offices in Australia, New Zealand, London and New York as well as owning her own ground handling operation in China.
 
Wendy was honoured by the British Travel & Hospitality Hall of Fame in 2017.