The minsu business, Chinese bed-and-breakfasts or guest houses, was just starting to find its feet when coronavirus hit. Property owners have been trying to find new ways to make money from their empty rooms.
By ZHENG Cuiying, HUANG Jiawei
In early January this year, YANG Huishan and her team went to Sri Lanka to look at the bed-and-breakfast market there. She planned to open ten new BnBs in Shanghai before the Spring Festival, back at the end of January. But Covid-19 stole a march on the tourists and left Yang’s plans in the balance.
Chinese BnBs, known as minsu, were thriving according to the statistics from bigdata monitoring platform Trustdata. Online bookings for minsu quadrupled from 2016 to 2019, with the number of hosts and rooms doubling. Of course, all that changed in January when the minsu were all shut down. Spring Festival, which should have been the peak season, was a disaster.
A report in Travel Daily showed that in Q1, occupancy dropped to around 20 percent and prices fell. Many hosts gave up.
For Yang, the low point came in April. All her minsu were closed, she had no income but still had to pay the rent and salary. “I lost 1 million yuan (US$ 140,000) every month,” she said.
Heads dropped. Yang and her employees understood well why their minsu were closed but couldn’t help but feel distraught. “We didn’t do anything illegal,” she said.
ZHANG Dawei, another minsu owner in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, had to let half of his staff go. “The policy changes every day,” he said. “You never know what’s coming next.”
Yang wasn’t going to die wondering, so on Valentine’s Day, she started an advertising campaign with big discounts and made 400,000 yuan. Most of Yang’s properties are historic buildings, and some are not minsu, but simply there to visit.
In March, as business resumed in Nanjing, Zhang rooms had no orders.
“The majority of my customers are from out of town,” he said. “And since most people still don’t want to leave their hometowns, I had to change my strategy.”
He moved his minsu into private cinemas. At the time entertainment venues such as cinemas and KTVs were closed. Zhang began renting to small groups to watch movies and has since he turned some of his rooms into video halls and received more than a thousand orders in a month. Now, he is considering making it a regular business.
As travel restrictions loosened, the minsu business revived. Yang’s rooms were fully booked over the Dragonboat Festival holiday in late June.
DENG Jun, another minsu host in Nanjing, said as the market recovery offers more ladders than snakes. Deng and his partners invested three million yuan recently and rented 60 apartments in Nanjing. Many of the apartments are owned by other hosts who were either doing business as a hobby or lost their enthusiasm.
Local governments and online travel agents have helped to rebuild confidence. Nanjing has policies of customer registration and disinfection of rooms. Meituan Dianping allows extra recommendations on its app for minsu with good sanitation reviews.
