World-renowned top hotel brands are flocking to Mogan Mountain in droves!

Recently, Pullman Hotel Mogan Mountain officially opened, becoming the first international chain brand hotel in the core scenic area of Mogan Mountain. With a total investment of about 320 million yuan, covering an area of 78 mu, it has 35 independent villas and 137 guest rooms. There are no high-rise buildings, nor the business hotel temperament commonly seen in traditional urban Pullman hotels. Instead, it is equipped with parent-child swimming pools, pet-friendly parks, children's activity spaces and a full set of mountain resort supporting facilities.

This is not the first time that high-end accommodation has appeared in Mogan Mountain, but the official entry of international chain brands has provided a new accommodation option for this mountain destination which has been famous for its boutique homestays for more than ten years. In recent years, as the base of homestays, why are more and more international hotel brands coming to Mogan Mountain for layout?

Pullman has built a "resort" in Mogan Mountain 

This Pullman hotel in Mogan Mountain has been different from the very beginning. With a total investment of 320 million yuan, covering an area of 78 mu, it owns 35 independent villas and 137 guest rooms. If you only look at these figures, it is difficult to associate it with a traditional international chain hotel.

When arriving in Mogan Mountain, Pullman did not build the familiar high-rise hotel, but spread out the guest rooms along the valley terrain. Each villa faces the bamboo sea or tea plantation, with no high-rise buildings or dense building clusters. Walking inside, it is more like a resort hidden in the mountains.

The products are also obviously re-adjusted around the resort scenarios. Outdoor parent-child swimming pools, children's parks, pet camps and landscape trails are placed in the valley, parent-child designs such as bunk beds and small tents are added to the room types, and parent-child dining areas are also set up in the restaurants.

Rather than moving a Pullman hotel from the city to Mogan Mountain, it is better to say that it has remade the products according to the local resort demands.

The reason why this change is worth paying attention to is that in the impression of many people, Pullman is a quite typical international hotel brand.

Pullman Shanghai Jing'an is located in the core of the business district, Pullman Shenzhen Shenzhen Railway is connected to the transportation hub, Pullman Sanya Bay is close to the coast, and Pullman Lijiang extends the resort scenario to the surrounding areas of the ancient city.

This brand, which came into being in the era of railway travel in 1859, has the attribute of "traveler's post station" in its bones. Now although it has entered more resort destinations, this time in Mogan Mountain, it has obviously implemented the concept of "resort" more thoroughly.

A highly standardized international brand is willing to adjust its product line for a destination, which itself shows its confidence in the local market. It is very clear that guests coming to Mogan Mountain do not come for meetings, but to bring children, relax and spend weekends, and the logic of urban business hotels does not work here.

The pricing is also very interesting. The daily room rate is stably maintained in the range of 1000-2000 yuan. This price range is very delicate: on the upper level, top-tier luxury wild resort projects such as Naked Castle and Naked Valley cost more than 2000 yuan per night even in the off-season, and often reach 3000 to 4000 yuan per night in the peak season. On the lower level, ordinary homestays cost hundreds of yuan per night, focusing on cost performance.

Pullman is in the middle, which is exactly the most acceptable budget range for family weekend vacations in the Yangtze River Delta. A family stays for two nights, plus dining and surrounding tours, the total cost is controlled within a certain range. It not only has the service guarantee of an international brand, but also will not be too expensive to make people hesitate.

After half a month of trial operation, there are already hundreds of comments on OTA platforms. After browsing them, you will find that the vast majority of guests are families with children.

Many comments mention "stable service", "no need to worry" and "satisfactory for both the elderly and children". This is exactly what homestays are relatively difficult to provide: the standardized service bottom line.

It does not try to turn itself into another "mountain homestay", but uses the mature service system and operation capability of international hotel brands to integrate parent-child experience, catering, entertainment, accommodation and mountain environment into a more complete resort product.

What on earth makes Mogan Mountain so attractive that it is worthy of international hotel brands to carry out such resort business here?

Marriott, Four Seasons, Pullman  Why are all of them "favoring" Mogan Mountain 

The site selection of an international resort hotel certainly does not only depend on the scenery. For international hotels like Pullman, a destination must meet several conditions at least: the source of tourists should be close enough, tourists should be willing to stay overnight, the destination itself should have mature resort awareness, and there should be enough content to support a two to three-day stay.

Mogan Mountain just meets all these requirements. The reason why Pullman is willing to locate its all-villa product in Mogan Mountain is first of all to calculate the most practical passenger flow account.

Mogan Mountain is located in the exact center of the Yangtze River Delta. It takes 1.5 to 2 hours to drive from Shanghai, just over 1 hour from Hangzhou, and it is also within the 3-hour self-driving circle from Nanjing and Suzhou.

This distance is exactly the golden radius for weekend vacations. You can set off after getting off work on Friday and return on Sunday afternoon, no need to ask for leave, and no need to bear the time cost of long-distance travel.

For Pullman, what is more noteworthy is not how many tourists Mogan Mountain receives in a year, but how many of them are willing to stay overnight.

Last year, the number of overnight tourists in Mogan Mountain reached 1.33 million, with a year-on-year increase of 10.32%, and the growth rate remained around 10% in the first half of this year. This means that Mogan Mountain already has a stable demand for accommodation, and what Pullman needs to do is to find its own customer group from these people.

In addition to passenger flow, Mogan Mountain also has a natural resource threshold. What really attracts Pullman to Mogan Mountain is not the simple "mountain scenery", but the resort scenarios formed behind the mountain scenery.

Bamboo forests, streams and valleys can themselves become the landscape of the hotel, and can be further transformed into activities such as hiking, cycling, stream tracing and parent-child natural experience.

What is particularly critical is that Mogan Mountain has low-density land resources suitable for high-end resort hotels. Especially international resort brands are more accustomed to dispersing guest rooms, villas, catering and leisure spaces into the natural environment, making "living in the mountains" an experience itself.

This exactly matches Pullman's product design in Mogan Mountain. 35 independent villas require a low-density mountain environment, parent-child products require outdoor space, and family vacations require enough rich surrounding activities, all of which are not difficult to find in Mogan Mountain.

More importantly, the development of Mogan Mountain has not fully moved towards large-scale urbanization. The core scenic area on the mountain retains a relatively complete natural environment, and different villages at the foot of the mountain have formed their own characteristics.

Yucun Village gathers coffee shops, cultural and creative stores and markets, and areas such as Xiantan have formed mature homestay clusters, and formats such as outdoor sports and rural experience are also increasing continuously.

This means that the surrounding area of the hotel itself is an available "destination". After checking into Pullman, guests do not need to spend all their time in the hotel, nor do they need to drive to find new attractions every day. There are already enough things in the mountain to keep guests staying.

But what really makes international brands dare to enter is another layer of hard-to-replicate thing, which is the "mental asset" accumulated by Mogan Mountain over 20 years.

The current resort market of Mogan Mountain did not appear suddenly. Back in 2007, Naked Retreats entered Mogan Mountain and turned "living in the mountains" into a new way of vacation.

Subsequently, a number of accommodation brands such as Naked Valley, Naked Castle, West Hillside, Dali Zhiye and Jun'anli grew up one after another, and Mogan Mountain gradually changed as a result. The industry has reached a consensus that "China's homestays look at Deqing, and Deqing's homestays look at Mogan".

Over the past 20 years, the homestays in Mogan Mountain have completed a difficult task: they let consumers know that when they come here, they do not have to visit scenic spots, but can choose a favorite accommodation and slowly enjoy a weekend.

This is also the most attractive point of Mogan Mountain to international hotels today. It not only has stable short-distance tourist sources in the Yangtze River Delta, but also has formed mature overnight demand. It not only has mountain resources that can support hotel products, but also has accumulated more than ten years of consumer mindset of "living in the mountains".

Of course, Pullman is not the only international brand that sees this market. Deqing Marriott has also opened around Mogan Mountain, with about 200 guest rooms. Compared with Pullman's low-density villa products, Marriott chooses a more standardized and larger-scale international brand hotel path.

Last year, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts announced that it will build a new luxury resort hotel in Mogan Mountain, planning to introduce natural hot springs, outdoor swimming pools and local cultural experiences.

From these completed and announced projects, the product paths of international brands entering Mogan Mountain are different: Marriott values the large-scale accommodation demand, Pullman cuts into the mountain parent-child vacation market, and Four Seasons focuses on higher-end hot spring and health care experiences.

International big brands enter the mountains, Mogan Mountain's accommodation market begins to "stratify" 

When many people see international hotels entering Mogan Mountain, their first reaction is "will the business of homestays be snatched away?". With the entry of different brands such as Pullman, Marriott and Four Seasons, the originally relatively concentrated accommodation market is gradually dividing into several clearer tracks, and each track targets different guests.

For a very long time in the past, the most distinct label of Mogan Mountain's accommodation market was homestay. From small boutique homestays with several to more than ten guest rooms to high-end projects such as Naked Valley and Naked Castle, the experience of "living in the mountains" was basically provided by homestays.

But the problem also lies here: when the tourist sources of Mogan Mountain become more and more diverse, the demands that homestays can meet are limited after all.

This is also why different types of hotels such as Pullman, Marriott and Four Seasons begin to enter Mogan Mountain. They are not copying the same product, but corresponding to different accommodation demands.

For one person or a couple, what they may need is a characteristic boutique homestay. For a family trip, what they need is a worry-free comprehensive resort hotel. For enterprise teams, what they need is a business resort hotel that can receive groups on a large scale. For older customer groups, they may need products such as hot springs, health care and long-term stay.

In the past, for consumers who were willing to spend two to three thousand yuan or even higher for one night, there was basically only one choice: high-end homestays and wild luxury projects. Naked Valley and Naked Castle set the price at 3000 to 6000 yuan per night, which almost became the pronoun of high-end luxury accommodation in Mogan Mountain.

But when Four Seasons enters the market with hot springs and health care experiences, and Pullman and Marriott can meet a wider range of resort demands, these consumers have more choices, and the pressure faced by high-end homestays is naturally more direct.

It is especially worth paying attention to top-tier luxury projects such as Naked. Naked Valley and Naked Castle represent the early wild luxury resort route formed in Mogan Mountain, and consumers pay a premium for the mountain environment, private space and complete resort experience.

But when brands like Four Seasons enter the market with hot springs, health care and a more complete high-end service system, some customer groups who were originally willing to pay high prices for high-end mountain vacations and value health care experiences may have more choices in the future.

Those homestays whose prices are already not low but still stay at the level of "beautiful rooms and nice environment" may face more and more pressure in the future.

For consumers, if the prices of a homestay and an international hotel are in the same range, the comparison between the two is no longer just "whose room is more beautiful", but the service stability, catering, entertainment content, public space and even brand guarantee.

In fact, the homestays in Mogan Mountain have long been actively looking for new space. In the past, they only sold a room, but now more and more projects have begun to add content such as camping, research and study, outdoor sports and local experiences, which essentially answers the same question: why do guests want to stay one more night?

Therefore, in the future, Mogan Mountain may not have a situation where one kind of accommodation product takes in all guests. It is more likely that the accommodation market will become more and more segmented.

Some people focus on small and exquisite homestays to serve couples, friends and solo travelers well; some people make family vacations to the extreme; some people undertake enterprise team building and large groups; some people extend to high-end health care and long-term stay.

Homestays with real characteristics, rich content and stable customer groups can still hold their own positions, but those homestays that have no distinct characteristics, lack service capabilities and have unchanged products for many years will face more and more direct competition in the future.

Because it is difficult for them to be more personalized than boutique homestays, and it is also difficult for them to be more standardized and complete than international hotels. This is also a necessary process for a mature tourist destination.

The arrival of Pullman may not really change the number of hotels in Mogan Mountain, but it begins to provide more ways to divide the accommodation market cake. For consumers, there are more choices, and for hotels and homestays, the competition is also more direct.

The ones that stay in the end are not necessarily only international hotels, nor only homestays, but those accommodation products that can really make differences in their own customer groups, products and services.

From this perspective, the entry of international hotels into the mountains is not the end of Mogan Mountain's homestay era, but a signal that Mogan Mountain's accommodation ecosystem has entered the next stage, expanding from quantity to product stratification, and shifting from homogeneous competition to positioning competition.

Thousands of homestays have made Mogan Mountain "hot", and more and more diverse accommodation products are making Mogan Mountain's accommodation ecosystem "complete".

When Mogan Mountain can accommodate boutique homestays, wild luxury resorts and international chain hotels at the same time, tourists are no longer just facing the question of "whether to go to Mogan Mountain", but a more specific question: this time when you go to Mogan Mountain, what kind of accommodation experience do you want to have?

This article is from the WeChat official account "Space Insider", written by Li Jiaru, authorized for release by 36Kr.