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China’s hotels get a Labour Day holiday windfall, raising room rates up to tenfold to cash in on post-Covid travel surge
- Some hotels have had to hire part-time workers to serve vast numbers of tourists after three years of the pandemic
- The windfall sparked by China’s reopening may only be a short-term phenomenon, one analyst warned
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Hotels in China have hit the jackpot during the Labour Day holiday with a huge surge in post-pandemic demand allowing them to raise their room prices more than tenfold in some cases.
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Such is the wave of pent-up demand that some hotels have had to hire part-time workers to meet the needs of vast numbers of tourists after three years of travel curbs to fend off the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Soaring hotel room prices had been expected by tourists, but the hefty price increase still turned out to be a nasty surprise [to them],” said Franco Feng, chief executive of Shanghai-based travel services firm Shenxiaokou.
“In some areas, tourists are complaining about the quality of service even after they paid a large sum of money because hotels and inns lack staff to clean up rooms or serve food.”
According to the Guangzhou-based Yangcheng Evening News, some hotels in Yangshuo, a resort town in southwest China’s Guangxi province, charged guests prices more than 16 times its normal rates on April 30 as travel demand peaked.
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In Shanghai, the Post found hotel room prices were at least twice their normal rates during the five-day break that started on April 29.
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