The ice and snow traffic set off by Gu Ailing brought fire to the "mid-range hotel"?

Image source @ Visual China

Text | Space Quest, author | Rebbe

Ctrip data shows that the number of ski hotel orders in the first three days of the Spring Festival this year increased by 52% year-on-year, and the per capita expenditure of hotels increased by 13% compared with last year's Spring Festival. On February 8, in the final of the freestyle ski women's big jump at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the perfect jump of China's Gu Ailing caused the whole network to boil, and the talented girl's snow style was really exciting. The Winter Olympics have greatly promoted the heating up of ice and snow tourism, and ice and snow vacations have truly become the "hot" fashion of the "cold" economy, and have become more and more popular with the public, and for hotels, this is no longer just a carnival of high-luxury hotels.

Recently, ZMAX HOTELS and IU Hotels and other mid-range (including mid-to-high-end) hotel chain brands have successively laid out in ice and snow tourism cities. It is foreseeable that this carnival of snow tourism will attract more and more mid-range hotel and even budget hotel brands to participate.

Snow tourism is not just a carnival of high-end hotels

According to the "Research Report on the Development of China's Ice and Snow Industry (2021)", in the 2020-2021 ice and snow season, the mainland's ice and snow leisure tourism revenue exceeded 390 billion yuan. It is estimated that by 2025, the number of ice and snow tourists on the mainland will exceed 500 million person-times, and the income of ice and snow tourism will exceed 1.1 trillion yuan.

Especially under the multiple stimulus of the Beijing Winter Olympics and the return of outbound tourism, the number of tourists in the 2021-2022 ice and snow season is expected to reach 305 million, and the income of ice and snow tourism is expected to reach 323.3 billion yuan. Among them, accommodation consumption accounted for the highest proportion of the overall travel expenses, reaching 24%.

It is in this context that many high-end luxury resort hotels have taken the lead in laying out popular cities for ice and snow tourism. Marriott has launched the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Harbin and the Beijing Yanqing Marriott Hotel in Harbin and Yanqing, and InterContinental has launched crowne Plaza Beijing Jinyu Badaling and Crowne Plaza Cuiyun Mountain in Chongli and Yanqing, as well as the InterContinental Chongli Hotel, which is expected to open in the first quarter.

After years of development, some popular snow resort areas have now formed a group of high-luxury resort hotels. Changbaishan Luneng Resort and Changbaishan Wanda International Resort, as the two representative areas, currently have a total of 10 high-end hotels, including MGallery, Swissotel, ClubMed, Park Hyatt, Hyatt, Westin, Sheraton and Wanda Jinhua.

For luxury hotels, snow tourism has its natural irresistible charm. Affected by the environment, the occupants need not only food and accommodation, but also various supporting services related to ice and snow tourism, such as equipment rental and leisure and entertainment other than skiing, and it is easier to implement one-price all-inclusive vacation accommodation products in ice and snow resort areas.

In contrast, mid-range and mid-to-high-end chain brands with business travelers as the main consumer group have rarely appeared in ice and snow resorts before. However, recently, newly opened hotels in ice and snow tourism cities and resorts have frequently appeared in mid-range and high-end hotel chain brands.

On January 1, Zhangjiakou Snow Ruyi Ruijing Hotel was officially opened, and while being responsible for receiving domestic and foreign technical officials of the Winter Olympics, it also launched ice and snow-themed rooms; in mid-January, Wanda's mid-range brand Wanda Yuehua Fell Zi Changbai Mountain, becoming the brand's first layout in the ice and snow tourism city; also in January, ZMAX HOTELS officially landed in Changchun, with the theme of "Hot Ice and Snow World", integrating local humanities and regional characteristics into it.

The mid-range and mid-to-high-end brands of the International Hotel Group are also on the move. InterContinental's Yiheng Luozi Chongli, Zhangjiakou Chongli Yiheng Hotel is currently online on the intercontinental official website, trams can directly reach the Taiwu Ski Town; Marriott's Yuansu Luozi Yanqing, Beijing Yanqing Yuansu Hotel opened in August 2021, only 20 minutes drive from the National Alpine Ski Center; in addition, as China's 225th hotel, Hampton by Hilton Harbin Qunli recently opened, completing another layout in the ice and snow city.

The various brand dynamics all convey the news that the accommodation market for ice and snow tourism will no longer be a lonely carnival of high-luxury hotels.

Mid-range entry, why now?

Generally speaking, in the initial layout of a tourism industry, harvesting in the hot stage is a conventional practice of hotel investment and construction. However, in the early stage of the heating up stage of ice and snow tourism development, it is rare to see the frequent actions of mid-range and high-end hotels, why do you enter the ice and snow tourism? The reasons for this may be the following.

One is the continued heat of the accommodation market. In addition to the above-mentioned Ctrip-related data, the number of bookings made by hotels around the ski resort on same-trip travel increased by 140% month-on-month during New Year's Day 2022. According to Li Yang, general manager of the marketing division of Jingshang Tourism Group, the official hotel of Zhejiang Anji Yunshang Grassland Ski Resort was full of rooms for 3 consecutive days. Not only hotels, but also homestay business is booming. Tujia data shows that during this year's Spring Festival, the number of bookings for homestays around Guanyintang Ski Resort and Jiangnan Tianchi Ski Resort in Huzhou increased by more than 20% year-on-year, and the number of bookings around Ningbo Shanggang Ski Resort increased by nearly 200% year-on-year. Therefore, the entry of mid-range and high-end chain brands is in line with the trend.

The second is the spillover of demand from new customer groups. According to the "2021 China Ski Holiday Consumption Report", the total number of post-00s and post-90s "Generation Z" people participating in ice and snow tourism in the 2021-2022 ice and snow season accounted for 60%, an increase of 2% year-on-year, showing a "younger" trend, many of which stayed for 5 days or more and were senior ski enthusiasts.

However, as a legendary skiing that is called the "three loser hobbies" along with photography and fishing, every love needs money to support it. How expensive is a property near the slopes? This year's Spring Festival, the average unit price of homestays around several major ski resorts in Zhejiang reached 2624 yuan / room day. In the entire ski spending system, expenses such as transportation and snow tickets cannot be reduced, and accommodation has become the first expenditure item that can be streamlined. Therefore, mid-range and mid-to-high-end hotel chains with more cost performance advantages have become a more economical choice for those customers who have been stationed in ski resorts for a long time.

The third is the brand rejuvenation innovation orientation. After the competition of mid-range hotel chains entered the second half, the theme segment became a new sea of competition, and brands tried to create differentiated hotels through special themes. The successful construction of theme hotels such as humanities, lifestyle and intelligent technology has become the confidence for mid-range hotel chains to develop more theme hotels.

Moreover, for mid-range hotel chains, whether it is humanities, lifestyle and other topics, what brands need to complete is an open-ended theme essay. However, ice and snow tourism is a propositional essay for it, which can be completed and organically integrated with the brand tone and expressed in the product. Coupled with the traffic and market value of the theme of snow tourism itself, mid-range hotel chains naturally do not miss the active attempts on it.

The fourth is that the background strength support is in place. Judging from the mid-to-high-end hotels listed above in the ice and snow tourism market this year, all of them have group backgrounds, such as CTS Hotel Group behind Ruijing Hotel, Wanda Wine Management behind Wanda Yuehua, and Jin Jiang International behind ZMAX HOTELS. Therefore, the layout of these brands is inseparable from the deployment and support of the group.

For the Group, there are two main forces in the ice and snow tourism market. First, due to external forces, the value of the ice and snow tourism market and the growth potential of the customer base are as mentioned above, and will not be repeated here. Second, the internal force has prompted that mid-range and high-end hotel brands have become the main force in the group's scale expansion in recent years. Jin Jiang International, BTG Hotels and China Lodging are the three giants, without exception. Coupled with the development strategy of "de-economication", mid-range and mid-to-high-end hotels increasingly need to accelerate expansion. From this point of view, how can hotel groups miss out on snow tourism cities and resorts as popular tourist destinations.

There are 3 difficulties in front of "Snow Field White"

If you look at the time of entering the ice and snow market, the mid-range hotel that has been late in entering the market is more like a "snow field white". Before becoming a "premium player", you must go through many tests and overcome many difficulties. At present, it is these three difficulties that need to be solved urgently in mid-range and mid-to-high-end hotels.

• After the snow season, how to spend the green season

Ice and snow tourism is a seasonal business, and in Japan's Hoshino Group, they refer to December to March as the "snow season" and the other seasons as the Green Season. Because the ice and snow resorts are mostly mountainous, the non-snow season mountains will be covered with vegetation, and the customer base will also decrease sharply with the fading of ice and snow, and the ice and snow resorts have entered the off-season.

According to the "2019 China Ice and Snow Industry White Paper" of the Head Leopard Research Institute, at this stage, domestic ski resorts are basically closed in the summer, and less than 10% of the ski resorts carry out summer operations. At the same time, the high-altitude occupancy rate of facilities and the frequent flow of people have affected the stability of snow field operations, and this is only a bleak performance of ice and snow tourism in the green season.

Demand for accommodation will also decline as ski enthusiasts disperse, and the occupancy rate of many hotels in ski resorts is "snow and ice". Some independent hotels choose to make money during the snow season, and in the green season, they only renovate and maintain the equipment. For mid-range hotel chains, it is difficult for both the group and investors to agree with this approach, so how to deal with the bland performance of the green season has become a mandatory question.

• Propositional composition, how to break the homogenization?

As mentioned above, ice and snow tourism in mid-range hotels is a propositional essay that defines the theme. Even in the open-end topic, the huge mid-range hotel is inevitably caught in the theme homogenization, and ice and snow tourism is naturally no exception.

However, this is also related to the development status of ice and snow tourism. When it comes to snow tourism, skiing and snow watching are still the first impressions of many people. Because the early ice and snow tourism was an exhibition activity with the theme of ice sculpture, it was only after the development of skiing, snow entertainment and other related supporting facilities, and now it is gradually developing into the direction of sightseeing and skiing, and various "ice and snow +" products have appeared.

Therefore, in some ice and snow-themed hotels, ice sculptures, ice lanterns, wooden houses and other traditional representative elements related to ice and snow are reused. Coupled with the climatic limitations of the ice and snow resort, the building façade and external public areas leave limited space for the design team to play, and the interior becomes the main space for its stacking of ice and snow elements. How mid-range hotel chains transmit snow and ice elements to their guests through a differentiated spatial language is not an easy task.

• What should I do if I first arrive and have a weak foundation?

In addition to the above two points, the weak foundation is another difficulty for the mid-range hotel that has just arrived. At the same time, most mid-range hotel chains have not previously focused on the leisure and vacation market, and tourism is its short board. Moreover, the operation and management logic of the ice and snow tourism accommodation market is different from that of conventional urban hotels, and the operation and management logic of mid-range hotel chains also needs to be changed.

It should be noted that those high-end hotels that enter the snow tourism resort early have been honing for a long time. The 10 high-end luxury hotels in Changbaishan Luneng Resort and Changbaishan Wanda International Resort have been open for many years, forming their own operation and management experience and management standards for mountain hotels. At the same time, these high-end hotels also have genetic advantages, such as the Swissotel Resort of Changbai Mountain Luneng Resort, which originated in Switzerland, the world's ice and snow industry power.

In addition to the three core links of team, products and services, adjusting the speed is also a must-do action for mid-range hotel chains. After all, freezing three feet is not a day's cold, and the heat of the ice and snow tourism market is not something that can be ignited at will in three or two days. The mid-range hotel chain that is accustomed to "galloping" has just entered, and it may be a better choice to slowly go.

Mid-range hotel, how to achieve their own ice and snow feast?

There is a mopping device called the Magic Carpet on the slopes, and after slowly ascending, you can reach the starting point of the slopes and start sliding. The current mid-range hotel chain is undoubtedly in this state, some brands have begun to glide carefully, and some brands are still on the way to the departure point on the magic carpet, looking forward to a smooth slide. However, based on the several difficulties mentioned above, how can a mid-range hotel chain have its own ice and snow feast?

• Featured destinations

At the beginning of this feast of ice and snow, the first task of the mid-range hotel chain is to choose the right "snow field", that is, the destination. Judging from the current distribution of high-luxury hotels, the ski resort is the preference of high-luxury hotels, and even a hotel group has been formed. But in addition, snow resorts, ice and snow theme parks and ice tourism cities are all good choices. However, in these three destinations, there is also room for the best of the best.

The first is the snow resort, the preferred area with a "full season operation" model. All year round, various activities are held to provide the hotel with a steady stream of customers, chongli Taiwu Ski Town and Fulong Four Seasons Town are among them. The second is the snow park, which is the first choice for parks with hotel clusters. The existence of the hotel group can allow the mid-range hotel chain to undertake the overflow customer base resources of some high-end hotels, and the high occupancy rate of hotels and homestays around Disney is enough to prove the huge base of this part of the customer base. Finally, there are ice and snow tourism cities, which are preferred provinces and cities that combine business activities and leisure vacations. It can not only meet the resort layout of mid-range hotel chain brands, but also a kind of decompression of hotel operation and management.

• Broaden service boundaries

Among the existing hotel products of ice and snow tourism, mid-range hotel chains have a short board that cannot be ignored, that is, hardware. In Changbai Mountain, for example, the skihouse equipment of Hyatt hotels and Park Hyatt hotels meets the needs of guests to change ski equipment and "slide in and out" without leaving home. Service has become a key part of the mid-range hotel to break through the hardware shortcomings.

The first is to create more personalized and creative services. Although mid-range hotel chains cannot meet the personalized consumption needs of all groups, they can create more brand-personalized creative services to win the love of guests. For example, the previous Changbai Mountain Mid-Range Hotel chose several Alaskan dogs as hotel mascots, and successfully captured a number of guests.

The second is to link up the surrounding resources to upgrade the accommodation experience. The mid-range hotel chain with a relatively simple operating system is more flexible in the linkage with the surrounding ice and snow tourism resources. Especially in some all-season ski resorts, mid-range hotel chains can be combined with a variety of activities, from exhibitions, team building, green walking, camps, photography to ice and snow music festivals, etc., to be more inclusive.

• Redefine snow accommodation products

According to the "China Ice and Snow Tourism Development Report (2021)", the ice and snow tourism dividend has now benefited more people such as the elderly, teenagers and low-income groups. The influx of these customers also means that ice and snow tourism accommodation products will no longer only have a single definition of "vacation", and mid-range hotel chains that have successfully tried multiple themes will become one of the key forces in redefinition.

On the one hand, hotel products need to take into account the needs of more segments. Imagine what kind of surprises mid-range hotel chains will bring to the consumer base of ice and snow tourism when pet-friendly, long-term and social hotels and other sub-theme hotels are combined with ice and snow tourism. On the other hand, the hotel space re-innovates the integration of ice and snow elements. In the newly opened ZMAX HOTELS Changchun People's Square Jida Second Courtyard Store, glass bricks, Changhong glass and other materials are used to simulate crystal clear ice bricks, and are decorated with fresh and warm orange as colors, and the contrast between the "ice and snow" of northeast winter and the "enthusiasm and boldness" of northeast people is skillfully transmitted in the space.

Carefully calculated, starting from the official launch of the special tourism route for ice and snow scenery tourism for the first time in 1992, ice and snow tourism has only been established for a long time. In contrast, mid-range hotel chains have also entered the peak of development in recent years. When the ice and snow tourism market that is heating up meets the mid-range hotel chain brands that are performing rapidly in the urban hotel market, after the encounter between the strong and the strong, what kind of brave new story will be staged in the ice and snow? Times and snowflakes are the best witnesses.