It is another year of Qingming Festival, as the first small long holiday after the Spring Festival, the weather is warmer, and the spring scene is in full bloom. Coupled with the tradition of "going out to worship ancestors" in various places, the flow of tourists such as visiting relatives, tourism, and business is intertwined, and self-driving travel has become one of the most important travel modes for the public during the Qingming holiday. The day before the holiday, the export traffic of the entire Jiangsu high-speed network was 2.8732 million vehicles, an increase of 38.27% over the same period last year.
As an important part of highway travel, the service area has been continuously upgraded and innovated in recent years to meet the increasingly personalized and diversified needs of travelers. From the improvement of infrastructure such as parking spaces, charging piles, and toilets to the enrichment of business formats and IP creation, several "hot and popular models" have been born. After the transformation, some high-speed service areas have even been dubbed "Little Wanda".
It can be seen that the rich consumption of the complex has become the common pursuit of the service area and tourists. But what is curious is how to expand the experience and retain customers in a rushed and limited scene, and what is the significance of this transformation?
"From Passenger Flow to Retention"
Experience is king, creating a destination-based service area
Under the background of the integration of transportation and tourism, the most obvious change in the high-speed service area in recent years is the adjustment and upgrading of the business format. Tourism and leisure industries such as hotels, RV camping bases, science and technology experience halls, and intangible cultural heritage exhibition halls, as well as entertainment experiences such as rock climbing and AR experience have become popular formats.
The New Business Home summarizes the business information of the most popular service areas listed by the China Highway Network, as detailed in the table below.
It can be seen that today's service areas are becoming more and more "more than just eating", and even the proportion of tourism and leisure industries has caught up with catering, for example, the non-catering business in the Yangcheng Lake service area has accounted for more than 65%. It is not difficult to understand that for long-distance travel, compared with aviation and railway, highways are no longer the most efficient preferred way, and service areas have become an important position to create differentiation and stimulate the diversity of drivers and passengers.
Taihu Lake Service Area
Compared with traditional shopping malls, high-speed service areas are faced with problems such as short stay time of passenger flow and large difference between holiday and working day passenger flow in both investment attraction and turnover. However, the ordinary catering industry cannot effectively extend the stay time of consumers, and the leisure and entertainment experience after the meal is the key to retaining customers. The commercial development of expressways has gradually transformed from the efficiency of "function + convenience" to the experience of "theme + content", and the goal of commercial operation has also shifted from transit consumption to parking consumption.
Yangcheng Lake Service Area
At present, the more common service area format is the introduction of coffee shops, children's playgrounds, cultural and creative retail stores, agricultural products and specialty stores, followed by the integration of local characteristics, and some rest areas to meet the needs of long-distance freight drivers This group has added full-time restaurants. For example, Chongqing Dazu Rock Carvings Service Area not only has an 8K dome theater and a 4K widescreen theater, which can accommodate 300 people to watch movies at the same time, but also has new leisure and entertainment projects such as escape rooms, script killing, and role-playing; many service areas also provide accommodation services for drivers and passengers, from standard rooms to RV camping, to meet diverse needs.
Dazu Rock Carvings Service Area Dome Theater
In addition, unlike the traditional impression of the old-style service area with inflated commodity prices, many merchants in the service area will launch targeted promotional offers according to the needs of the parent-child family market and business consumers. For example, there are more than 30 well-known brands stationed in the Shaxi service area of the Yanjiang Expressway, including Starbucks New Coffee, Suzhou folding fan, Jiangyin horseshoe crisp, Taicang factory store clothing, etc., and merchants have increased their holiday revenue by 50% compared with usual by adopting combined promotional methods such as special sales of goods and new product tasting.
Shaxi Service Area
It is worth mentioning that the Shanhaiguan Service Area of Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province, which ranks first in popularity, plans to invest a total of about 920 million yuan to build the first high-speed service area POD park in China - Ole Park in the Shanhaiguan Service Area. At that time, outlets and more than 100 internationally renowned brands will settle in, becoming an important cultural tourism destination in the Bohai Rim region.
"Before entering the city, enjoy the scenery first"
Cultural IP has become the core driving force
In addition to the richness of the business format, the service area also needs to break the monotonous mode of traditional combination from the perspective of diversity and experience according to its own theme characteristics. Especially for those traveling by car, the service area often represents the first impression of a city's image. The introduction of new business formats with elements such as urban history, folk culture, science and technology, and entertainment to settle in the service area is conducive to deepening the impression of past drivers and passengers and increasing communication power.
For example, in the Yangcheng Lake service area of Suzhou, the Supai architecture with obvious style at a glance, the landscape river with a length of 140 meters and a width of 8 meters after entering the service area, the decoration of the blue sky and white clouds overhead, and the commercial street and pavilions with small bridges and flowing water, leave a deep impression on the drivers and passengers who enter from the atmosphere. The back garden also draws on the characteristics of Suzhou Lingering Garden, Humble Administrator's Garden and Lion Forest to build Muxi Garden, Lotus Wind Garden and Bamboo Garden, which is evaluated as "not entering Gusu City, enjoying the scenery of Gusu".
Yangcheng Lake Service Area
Fangmaoshan Service Area, the first dinosaur-themed service area in mainland China, integrates dinosaur-themed culture and dinosaur cultural tourism products into various business formats such as catering, shopping, and entertainment. The service area also uses sound, light and shadow to create dinosaur AR, dinosaur rest area, dinosaur frolic area and other theme experience places to meet the needs of family travel parent-child interaction, zero distance contact with dinosaur IP, and many dinosaur-themed clothing and toys to choose from. At the same time, the merchants in the service area will also link the theme of the service area, such as the first coffee shop Costa, which launched a dinosaur-style latte art coffee.
Yangcheng Lake Service Area
The Tianquan service area of the Ya'an section of the Yakang Expressway in Sichuan Province takes panda culture as the theme, creating functional areas such as panda art installations, RV self-driving camps, and container accommodation camps. The commercial complex in the service area covers six major business formats, including Western-style catering, special food, coffee and tea, cultural and creative fashion brands, outdoor self-driving and exhibition and sales platforms, integrating giant panda culture with tourism, self-driving RV camps, outdoor sports, salt society and other industries.
In addition, there are various unique service areas such as the Guizhou Sky Bridge Service Area integrating the history and culture of the Buyi Yazhou pottery, and the Jiaxing Service Area showing the rich local history and culture of the Red Boat, which are closely related to the local culture in the design.
"Zhejiang Renjian Jiangsu Service Area"
Marketization promotes the transformation of the trigger model
It can be seen from the table of service area formats compiled above that Jiangsu's high-speed service area is very developed, and this cannot be avoided by the important group behind it - Zhejiang Tongxiang people.
According to surging news statistics, about 1,600 pairs of 3,200 pairs of high-speed service areas in the country are contracted by foreign parties, and about 1,200 pairs are contracted and operated by businessmen in Tongxiang, Jiaxing, accounting for 80%. It can be said that it is the people of Zhejiang who have made the high-speed service area into a big business of tens of billions.
Plum Village Service Area
Among them, it is not only the sensitivity of Tongxiang people to market demand, but also the absolute suppression of Jiangsu and Zhejiang under the geographical advantage.
According to the data of China's highway network, Jiangsu and Zhejiang are far ahead of other provinces in terms of average daily driving activity, and among the remaining five provinces, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hunan and Henan are all located in the central region, which is also a province with better economic conditions and a large transit traffic volume in the central region. It can be seen that the travel activity of expressways is closely related to the level of economic and social development of various places.
The "2023 Highway Service Area Travel Heat Analysis Report" points out that the highway service area located in the main skeleton of the national highway is more likely to become a hot spot, due to the monopoly of geographical location and the innate advantage of travel heat formed by the play of traffic location. What Tongxiang people are good at is to further develop their acquired advantages through characteristic theme building and brand operation and publicity.
The underlying logic of Tongxiang people's idea of transforming the highway is: "How to make you like me again, and I can make money".
Yangcheng Lake Service Area
If you think about it, there is no contradiction between the two, and if consumers like a product, they will be willing to pay for it. But winning the "like" of consumers is not an easy task. At this time, the humanized and meticulous service in the urban supermarket and the reasonable price of unified operation have become a reference.
Yangcheng Lake Service Area
In the past, the expressway service area emphasized the supporting service function, with a small volume and a single format, and the homogeneity and modularization between the service area and the service area. The urban shopping center highlights the emotional connection between people and shopping malls, emphasizes one-stop rich consumption, and provides clues in two directions for the upgrading and transformation of service areas.
First, business positioning and differentiated competition. Before 2015, the turnover of Jiangsu's service area was not ideal, and even lost money year after year. Through the transfer of operating rights, site leasing and other means, Jiangsu has gradually opened up the operation market of high-speed service areas and introduced private forces to participate in the operation. The business model of the high-speed service area has also developed from the initial self-operation and outsourcing to the current self-management, outsourcing + supervision, platform + brand and other business models. For example, Meicun Service Area, the first service area of Jiangsu Traffic Control to implement the outsourcing of management rights, has realized the transformation from the "old four" of traditional fast food, supermarkets, toilets and refueling to an urban commercial model in just over half a year.
Second, there is a fixed consumer group. This may seem like a hellish challenge for a busy service area, but it's also an effective way to deal with the reduced traffic on the road under the diversity of travel. In particular, for the service area that is close to the surrounding cities, the destination-type service area is built by building urban micro-vacation bases, youth research characteristic bases, RV and other theme camps, and commercial theme entertainment and shopping bases.
Taking the Shaanxi Meridian Service Area as an example, on the basis of integrating the natural scenery of Qinling Mountain, for the purpose of leisure and entertainment, the RV camping culture experience place has been created in the north area of the service area, with 16 high-end RV courtyards, each courtyard is equipped with an RV, and the RV courtyard is also equipped with a camping area that can accommodate 15 tents, which can be used for gatherings, banquets, parties, amusement, development, training and other activities. In the future, supporting facilities such as tea houses, screenings, and outdoor karaoke will be added, making it a good place for outdoor camping in Chang'an District.
Meridian service area
epilogue
The rapid development of expressway service areas is inseparable from its own location advantages, but also inseparable from the innovation under market-oriented competition. Whether it is urban business or service area business, it is still the direction that needs to be deeply cultivated to identify the needs and preferences of customer groups, grasp the service, price and experience, and create their own characteristic IP culture and memory points. For the "Internet celebrity service area" that has been developed, in addition to the consumer experience level, how to highlight green and low-carbon and strengthen smart innovation may become the next social issue that needs to be solved urgently.