Field | Hospitality Industry
01
During the Spring Festival this year, I noticed a young Chinese couple at the Four Seasons Hotel in Peninsula Papagayo, Costa Rica, 13,000 kilometers away from Beijing.
For three consecutive days, after breakfast, they appeared by the pool with their slippers in hand, each occupying a lounge chair. The schedule seemed to be copied and pasted: breakfast, beach, pool, nap, watching sunset, and going back to the room.
On the first day, I thought they were suffering from jet lag. On the second day, I thought they were thinking about where to go for fun. On the third day, I saw them still lying there motionless, with only ice soda in their hands that was about to melt and a half-opened book.
This picture is generated by AI
Four Seasons Hotel Costa Rica/Real photos from the travel industry
Out of curiosity, I approached the Virador Club at sunset with a glass of wine.
After chatting for a while, we learned that they live in the Bay Area of California, USA, and are a typical middle-class Chinese couple.
In the past, their travel style was the same as that of most Chinese people, who believed in efficiency first. To fly to the Caribbean, they had to visit four islands, and to go to Europe, they had to check in ten Michelin stars. Their mobile phone albums were filled with hundreds of photos, and they had to carefully layout them when posting to Moments.
The boy smiled and told me that this kind of check-in trip did not end until last year. It was the white colleagues around him and "White Lotus Resort" that influenced them.
When those colleagues came back from vacation and asked where they had gone, they said Mexico. When I asked what I was doing, I replied that I had done nothing. I just lay on the beach for a week to clear my mind.
At first they didn't understand and felt at a loss, but then they tried it once and found that doing nothing was the most advanced massage for the brain.
I also want to try to be like them, but the WeChat message on the phone screen in my hand has not gone out yet.
The boy seemed to notice my embarrassment. He raised his hand and pointed to Virador Beach below.
Following his finger, there were more than a dozen people lying sparsely on the golden beach. Some were reading, some were sunburned with their eyes closed, and some were simply staring at the waves in a daze.
Only no one is playing with their mobile phones.
He said, you see, here, taking out a mobile phone is even an offense. Everyone has a tacit understanding. After finally escaping from the world controlled by algorithms and emails, no one wants to be dragged back by a glowing screen.
I also subconsciously put my phone on the recliner and began to carefully examine the scenery in front of me. In front of me was no longer a screen filled with pixels. The most luxurious double-sided sea of the Papagayo Peninsula was laid out without reservation.
This four-season hotel occupies the narrowest waist of the peninsula. On the left, Virador Beach is where the Pacific Ocean sunset is turning the waves into gold. On the right, Blanca Beach is as quiet as a dark blue emerald.
Virador Beach/Travel Real Photos
The air is filled with the aroma of plants baked by the tropical sun, the building is humbly hidden in the jungle, and the waiters are invisible in the air. They will appear at the right time only when you are thirsty and want to drink ice-cold coconut water.
This kind of extreme privacy and restraint creates an invisible barrier, making every minute and second in the hotel so precious that any KPI check seems to be a waste of life.
02
Over the years, we have habitually referred to lying down on the beach as white people's vacation, and even summed up the three-piece middle-class suit of sunbathing on the beach, staring at the sea in a daze, and flipping through paper books.
But this kind of travel vacation where you waste your life on beautiful things is actually not just a white man’s patent.
If we extend the timeline, during the epidemic, this trend of hotels being rotten has quietly emerged in China.
During the National Day Golden Week in 2023, a set of data from Ali Business Travel sparked heated discussions. At that time, more than 68% of middle-class families chose the Staycation model.
The word translates very straightforwardly, staycation.
At that time, everyone couldn't go out, and the frustrated middle-class families began to look for alternatives, turning the hotels around them into distant places.
At that time, people may not have realized that this model of residence and vacation, which they were forced to choose in order to circumvent the quarantine policy, was reshaping a generation's view of travel.
During this year’s Spring Festival, Tongcheng Travel data showed that the overall booking popularity of hotels during the Spring Festival in Hainan increased by 191% year-on-year. Among them, the booking popularity of hotels in Sanya increased by 167% year-on-year. From Yalong Bay to Haitang Bay, the beach loungers were filled with tattered post-95s and post-00s.
After Sanya, a long-established vacation destination, became popular, many people discovered that instead of going to the scenic spots, just eating and drinking in the hotel was more stress-relieving than the special forces tour that broke a leg.
The complete explosion of this concept cannot be separated from the fuel of an American TV series.
"White Lotus Resort", which the domestic middle class is deeply obsessed with, is like a naked vacation textbook for the rich, exposing the travel methods of the top class to the public.
The first three seasons of "White Lotus Resort" were filmed at the Four Seasons Hotel
None of the elites who live in luxury hotel suites in the play care about the local attractions. All they care about are yachts, champagne, and how to spend time doing nothing.
This drama made many Chinese middle-class people realize for the first time that the true old-money style vacation is not about how many places you go, but how long you can stay in one place.
Just like the words the boy left when the couple got up and prepared to go back to the room yesterday: "It used to be like going out to play on a march, but then I felt that ordering a drink and lying around for the day like white people would be a real vacation."
It can be said that a good hotel itself is the prototype of the White Lotus-style vacation. It knows how to use a quiet price to absorb the time that guests have nowhere to spend.
What this reflects is actually a violent shock in the consumer psychology of the domestic middle class and newly wealthy class.
Why is doing nothing more expensive than cramming your schedule?
Perhaps because special forces travel and vacation are two completely different attitudes towards vacation. What is consumed on a trip are attractions, tickets, and materials that are tangible and tangible.
On the other hand, what you spend on a beach vacation doing nothing is the environment, services, and the sense of atmosphere that someone will carefully maintain for you even if you are in a daze.
Just like at the Four Seasons Hotel in Costa Rica, the atmosphere will be embodied in Versailles scenes.
For example, in the adult swimming pool, even guests need to pay extra to rent lounge chairs. Here, you can only hear the crisp sound of ice cubes hitting the glass and the dull sound of the Pacific Ocean in the distance.
Real photos from the travel industry
Quietness is particularly luxurious in the restless tropics, which means you can hand yourself over to a lounge chair without any precautions.
Some people may ask, what should families with children do if they want to lie flat?
This is the brilliance of the White Lotus Hotel, which gives parents the right to lie down. The Kids Club here provides all-day care services from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
This means that, regardless of whether you have a family with you or not, during the 9 hours during the day, you are just a couple who need the world of two people, not a nanny who revolves around the children.
The moment we send our children in, we redeem our freedom.
Four Seasons Kids club/real photos from the travel industry
The next step in redeeming freedom is usually physical and mental compensation.
The fancy spa treatments that the elites in "White Lotus Resort" are passionate about, top resort hotels in reality will also do it to the extreme.
The solution given by Four Seasons in Costa Rica is to set back the building and make the spa open. The treatment terrace and outdoor spa area extend along the tree line toward the seaside.
The chirping of birds, the sound of wind, and the sound of waves take over your attention little by little, making it easier for people to calm down. Listening to the guidance of the physical therapist, you will feel that the anxieties in your brain are being withdrawn little by little.
This is the most scarce and urgent need for people in China who yearn for white-style vacations.
Real photos from the travel industry
03
The reason why white-style vacations have taken root among Chinese people is not so much cultural metaphysics, or it may just be that our days outside of vacations are too tight.
Work has KPIs, children's education is under heavy pressure, and even sleep is broken down into a string of data by the bracelet. Over time, spending time with your family to rest has become a task.
So many people seem to be relaxing during their holidays, but in fact they are working overtime in a different place.
Nowadays, we are finally beginning to admit that our bodies and minds always need downtime for maintenance, and we need a period of unproductive time.
But there is an extremely hidden business logic here. Lying flat seems to be the simplest, but in fact the threshold is the highest.
I learned the lesson myself.
The summer before last year, I went to a resort in Thailand that was recommended repeatedly, intending to do nothing. However, the swimming pool was under renovation, the restaurant was expensive and terrible, and the bill was all about luxury. But when you lay down, something always clicked on you. The money was spent, and there was no rest at all.
A flat-bed vacation is actually the most stringent test for a hotel.
When you are in a hurry, the hotel is just a place to sleep. It doesn't matter whether it is good or not. But when you hand over the whole person and treat the hotel as everything, any shortcomings will be magnified.
Whether the bed is comfortable, whether the environment is quiet, whether there are sales promotions everywhere on the beach, these details are usually not noticeable. After lying down, every one of them becomes a problem.
What good hotels are good at is resolving these two extremes.
Take Four Seasons in Costa Rica as an example. You are rarely interrupted and you never run out of people.
When you are thirsty, ice water will appear at your hand. When you want to be quiet, the surrounding sounds will automatically calm down. There is no need to constantly make choices. The environment itself will filter out the noise, like an invisible safety net, providing a natural barrier for residents to lie down for vacation.
Real photos from the travel industry
You dare to give yourself to a recliner because you know that any needs you need can be received smoothly and smoothly.
Even if you just want to have a cup of special drink, or want to go for a walk in the rainforest or waterfall, or you just want to move dinner from the restaurant to the balcony of the guest room, your rhythm will not be disrupted.
This sense of stability may also be related to the Costa Rican philosophy of life.
The locals often say Pura Vida, which means simply, live a pure and slow life, and don’t push yourself too hard.
This sentence is especially true on the Papagayo Peninsula. The sea breeze blows over, the smell of tropical plants rises and falls, time seems to be stretched, and even anxiety seems redundant.
The real fear of lying down has nothing to do with boredom. Behind it is often that we always want to prove that our vacation has not been wasted.
And when the hotel is peaceful enough and the environment is good enough, everyone will slowly loosen the string in their hearts. Doing so will not make the holiday weaker, but will make you more like a person.
Real photos from the travel industry
So I later understood that the real vacation that the Bay Area Chinese couple was talking about was not as simple as ordering a glass of wine and lying around for the day.
The essence of white people’s vacation may be that we are finally willing to give time back to ourselves.
