Rosy future for budget hotels in China
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2006-10-18 10:06
Budget hotels in China are booming. Their recipe of "two-star lobbies,
three-star rooms and four-star beds" is increasingly popular with tourists and
occupancy rates are going through the roof.
During the week-long
National holiday, occupancy rates at about 3,000 budget hotels in Beijing
reached 90 percent, according to the municipal tourism bureau. Major tourist
destinations such as Shanghai, Qingdao, Hangzhou and Ningbo reported similar
rates.
Jinjiang Inn, China's largest budget hotelier, had opened 139
hotels with 19,812 rooms by June this year and has almost doubled capacity each
year for the last three years.
Other domestic operators like Home Inn
and Motel 168 are expanding through franchising and certified operations, which
are key expansion models for budget hotels in China.
"The budget hotel
boom shows that recreation tourism is gaining popularity among ordinary Chinese
people," said Wei Xiao'an, a researcher with the Tourism Research Center of
China's Academy of Social Sciences.
According to Wei, budget hotels are
a relatively new concept in China and do not yet have an official definition,
but industry insiders say budget hotels have "a two-star lobby, three-star rooms
and four-star beds."
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