Crowdfunding travels

With crowdfunded money, Zheng Shihao sees her dream of exploring Nepal come true. Photo: Courtesy of Zheng Shihao

Many college students and new graduates dream of traveling, sometimes to exotic and remote destinations but their dreams remain just dreams because they don't have the money to make them come true. Some students in Shanghai, however, are making their travel dreams come true by using crowdfunding.

The $5.3-billion crowdfunding industry has become popular in the West raising money from mainly small donations through the Internet to pay for projects, charities, sport, businesses or cultural events. In China now it is being used to help would-be travelers.

Zheng Shihao dreamed of exploring Nepal during her gap year and launched a crowdfunding campaign to achieve this. First, though, she removed her parents and family members from her WeChat "moments."

This turned out to be a very wise move. Her parents still don't know that she went to Nepal and they also missed out on the news that their daughter narrowly escaped death when she slipped and fell on a treacherous mountainside in Nepal. Her companion on the trek managed to pull her to safety just in time.

Her journey to Nepal was pure escapism, she said. Plagued with anxiety and depression in the middle of her gap year, before she considered an offer of study at the University of Southern California, Zheng simply wanted to escape her worries and flee reality. She also didn't want to concern her parents.

A platform for dreams

Dreamore.com is the platform that Zheng used to make her dream come true. Originally registered in Shanghai, Dreamore is now a business with 50 staff members. One of the original founders, Du Weibang, told the Global Times that the average age of his staff was just 22. To date the website has launched more than 800 projects including some 100 crowdfunded travels. Du said most of the site's travelers were university students or new graduates who fancied a trip but didn't have the money.

Having stated her dream destination and explained how she wanted to enjoy a 15-day journey to Nepal and explore its beautiful mountains and villages, Zheng found to her surprise that she had been pledged 134 percent of her target of 6,000 yuan ($964.44) within 30 days, with 2,000 yuan more in hand.

To promote her project and attract people willing to offer money for it, Zheng set up different levels of rewards for different levels of funding. Ranging from a basic 9-yuan donation to a serious pledge of 5,999 yuan at the highest level, donors could expect to receive a thank you postcard, a bottle of melted snow collected from Mount Qomolangma (Mount Everest), a diary of the trip or photos and videos of the journey.

Her online plan for the trip showed that she would have to walk for an average of five hours every day. "The worst time was when I nearly got myself killed. That day I also got myself really lost and it took me eight hours to find my way back to where I wanted to be."

That same month, just a week after Zheng and her five traveling companions had returned to China, 32 travelers died in a snowstorm in the same area.

"These are paths you can't wear high heels on. This is air you can't breathe properly if you have perfume on. And you don't meet anyone who works in an office," Zheng wrote in one of her e-mails to her backers after she returned to China.