Nearly two years, successively appeared “dear inn”, “youth hostel”, “the beautiful house” home stay facility variety shows, such as the pop stars ran to the home stay facility, on the day of daily necessities, buy food cooking, let more young people learn about the lives of home stay facility, return to nature, write daily, realized ‘” tori, picking the quiet of ideal.
In recent years, tourists are more inclined to stay in homestays, and fewer and fewer people choose to stay in hotels. In this market demand, more and more enterprises, capital to join the homestay camp. In addition to the foreign airbnb, many domestic enterprises and capital have entered the home stay industry, there have been hundreds of homes, Tujia, youjia home stay, free guest, xiaozhu short rent and other enterprises. The whole b&B market is bustling, so how does this “b&B fever” blow up?
Busy in the leisure, modern tension after the slow life
Statistics from the national Tourism Authority show that by the end of 2016, China had 53,852 home stay facilities, and the market is expected to reach 30 billion yuan by 2020. And the factors that promote the development of home stay industry are nothing more than the following two aspects.
On the one hand, traditional hotels have been unable to meet people’s diverse needs for accommodation. Traditional hotel decoration style, the difference is not big, thin personality theme, it is difficult to bring more freshness to consumers. And the management pattern is monotonous, lack of human touch. Especially for those who are on business trips all the year round, they often do not remember which cities they have been to, nor do they know the landmarks of those cities, etc., because they basically stay in hotels except for working hours. And hotels all over the world are decorated in the same style, unless it spans continents, it is impossible to tell which city is in which country, “want to live somewhere interesting” is the most direct requirements for these people to stay.
To some extent, the emergence of homestays has satisfied people’s demand for “interesting places to live”. Such as vacation home stay, experience home stay, feelings home stay, hobby home stay and so on are aimed at the needs of different groups of people, to attract tourists from all over the world. For example, ants aimed at family travel groups and piglets built “sentimental home stay” short-term rent.
On the other hand, the return of slow lifestyle has made homestay more and more popular. The development of economy drives the pace of modern life to accelerate, and people are eager to find a spiritual sanatorium between busy work, so that the tired body and mind can rest and relieve. Travel can make people relax temporarily, and in terms of accommodation, compared with “rational” hotels, “sensible” b&B is more popular. The reason why homestay attracts people lies in its regional characteristics and humanistic feelings. Different hobbies drive people to find different homestay, experience various kinds of life, and realize the goal of “fast work and slow life”. In the eyes of some people, homestay is not only food and clothing, but also represents a spiritual sustenance.
In general, the development of the b&B industry is booming due to the “lack of competition” of hotels and the diverse needs of people. But is the home stay market as prosperous as it seems? I’m afraid not.
In fact, problems are frequent in the glamorous home stay industry
“95 percent of b&BS are losing money,” “Haunted houses will appear in beautiful villages,” and “B&B bubble will burst.” In the past two years, such news emerged one after another, making people realize that the home stay industry has exposed many problems while developing rapidly.
First, the security is not strong, the user’s personal privacy is facing the crisis of disclosure. Homestay system is not perfect, the threshold is low, many homestay operation qualification is not perfect, security is not in place, residents’ privacy protection is not adequate and other problems. Last August, for example, a couple found a camera while staying at a b&B in Taiwan. Media person Xiao Wu in Yunnan Lijiang b&B just rented under 3 days, the next day back to find the room snoring constantly…… . Exposure of such incidents is not conducive to the establishment of a good brand image of b&B, easy to dispel the curiosity of tourists to b&B.
Second, individuals exist alone. Due to the lack of supporting public products, homestay cannot form a coherent travel chain in the local area. In addition to the waste of purchasing power, the lonely existence of home stay facilities will not guarantee the protection of environmental protection, planning, security and other public products, and greatly affect the external drainage of home stay facilities. In addition, even if there is good design and creativity in the early stage of home stay operation, it will fall into a vicious circle of lack of customers and poor reputation under the influence of factors such as poor geographical environment and insufficient product support.
Third, it is difficult to make profits. On the one hand, b&BS are mostly rented by owners to operators, who are relatively weak in contract consciousness and pay attention to direct interests and immediate impact. They will blindly raise rents and reduce the number of years of lease, which does not conform to the rules of the market, bringing high costs to operators and increasing the difficulty of making profits. On the other hand, in the off-season of tourism, housing is idle, and b&Bs also organically combine non-standard cultural services based on the hardware of star hotels. In this case, operators also need to spend high amounts of money to maintain operations, the cost pressure is increasing.
Fourth, the homogenization phenomenon is serious. Market demand in the field of homestay “players” more and more, the market is more and more crowded. Under this homestay wave, homestay product homogeneity is becoming more and more serious. “Thousands of times without characteristics” is the most direct view of many tourists on homestay. Due to the lack of personalized and characteristic ingenious ideas and service supply, most b&Bs can not meet the needs of tourists for agricultural experience, spiritual culture, etc., coupled with monotonous business model, which greatly reduces the return rate of consumers.
With the increase of travel frequency and people’s pursuit of slow life, the popularity of homestay is inevitable. But beneath the hubbub, problems are mounting. The increase of entrants, further cut the market share, coupled with the increase of operating costs, profitability is difficult to become a common problem in the industry. In addition, security risks are difficult to eliminate, product homogenization also greatly hamper the pace of development of homestay. Homestays still have some way to go before they can solve these problems.
Roadblocks, how to Break through the Chinese homestay?
In recent years, more and more entrepreneurs, hotel enterprises and capital forces have entered the field of home stay. For example, such as home, green city, green and other enterprises have carried out substantial investment layout; Huajian Hall, Wan Ruoguli, happy time and other brands of dormitory management companies have also started chain expansion. In addition, Airbnb, Tujia, Xiaozhu and others have opened several rounds of financing, the whole home stay market is very lively. However, based on the existence of difficult profit in the homestay market, the lack of safety and other problems, homestay industry to go to the next level, but also have to plan.
First of all, build characteristic brand, establish humanistic feelings, implement the core of “home”. According to the survey, the vast majority of consumers believe that the difference between b&B and standardized hotels lies in the contact with local life patterns and the implantation of characteristic themes, and that “sense of experience” and “theme” are the two characteristic labels of b&B. This is the main reason why consumers abandon hotels and choose homestay. The biggest difference between a b&B and a hotel is that the b&B has an owner. When the owner’s life experience and hobbies resonate with the tourists, it creates one of the ways to make profits for the b&B – “identity economy”. Therefore, taking the differentiated route and finding the unique style different from hotels and other b&Bs is the key point of b&B operation.
In addition, to improve the user experience, after be being entered in addition to the establishment of training institutions, using professional experience to strengthen the training of practitioners, optimize the training system, strengthen the soft service is also a good choice, have feelings, have the people of the story, after all, the host and thoughtful butler service system can move the heart of consumers.
Secondly, compared with the isolated homestay, homestay clusters bring greater benefits. By creating a complete set of homestay cluster area, to achieve the enrichment of rural functions and structures, so as to promote the development of catering, medical care, education, convalescence, agriculture and a series of industries. Under the influence of economic effect, it can attract more passengers to the local area, which can drive the development of local homestay. In addition, homestay cluster let homestay is no longer limited to “food and clothing”, can further enrich the pattern of “play”, greatly strengthened the attraction and endurance of homestay to the market.
Finally, the promotion of enterprise association, to provide opportunities for exchange and learning, so that the strengths more prominent, shortcomings to be made up. First, to cover the industry information network, strengthen communication between all levels of home stay, pool wisdom to deal with the contradiction of industry development and the change of the rhythm of tourism trend. For example, in 2017, Tujia integrated the flow of various platforms to achieve “8 for 1”. The housing inventory of eight platforms, including Tujia, Ant, Ctrip, elong, Qunar, 58 Ganji, wechat Hotel and Sesame Credit, was shared with one-click management, which greatly reduced the communication cost of landlords and made it convenient for tourists to find a room.
In general, homestay has developed well under the market demand and the prevailing sharing economy. Development is still in its infancy, but as a result of a home stay facility to solve the problem such as poor earnings, experience, can through the establishment of personnel training mechanism, pay great attention to setting up differentiation brand personality, encourage diversified innovation model, at the same time focus on the integration of humanistic and ecological environment, etc. To strengthen, only in this way can let the home stay facility industry to the next level, the real spring, Become a new force for innovative tourism.
Article/Liu Kuang public account, ID: Liukuang110