Under the “eight-point regulation”, star hotels are undergoing “a bitter winter season”. Recently, Cixi Landison Plaza Hotel in Ningbo City of Zhejiang became the first bankrupt 5-star hotel in China. In order to “pass the winter”, some hotels are trying to reposition themselves to adapt to the market by different means, such as lowering their star rates, while some hotels are trying to make a brilliant comeback by switching their businesses to another “sector”. In the recent panel discussion at the people’s congress session in Dongguan City of Guangdong Province, Wen Jiahui, the Chairwoman of Dongguan Women Entrepreneurs Association, suggested transformation of hotel business into elderly care business, and the mayor of Dongguan City expressed his approval of such a suggestion.

The suggestion for transforming a star hotel into a house for elderly care indeed sounds very high-level. In fact, such a case already exists in Shanghai. In 2014, the plaque of “Hongye Apartment for Elderly” was hung up at Hongye Hotel, a 3-star hotel on Changchun Road in Hongkou District of Shanghai. The background of this story was like this: the hotel was considering about transformation of its business, while the house for the elderly in Sichuan North Road Sub-district in Hongkou District was worrying about how to expand its business and add more beds, so both parties immediately came into an agreement, whereby Hongye Hotel would be rebuilt into a house for the elderly through lease. This undoubtedly provided a new way of thinking to the hotel business transformation.

In recent years, as the ageing issue is upscaling, the shortage of beds for elderly care in the downtown area is gradually prominent. Particularly in the city center, land use cost is sky-high for building a house for the elderly. In this regard, hotels located in the downtown area show great advantages in the location and surrounding facilities. As the business is declining and the market future is considered not good, transforming hotels into elderly care establishments on one hand can solve the difficulty of the elderly people to find a place to live in, and on the other hand can meet the needs of many elderly people for good quality of life. After all, the living environment in a hotel can’t be bad. In addition, for elderly people and their family members, such houses for the elderly are really within a “hot-soup-still-warm” (an easily reachable) distance.

Of course, turning a hotel into an elderly care establishment is not just as easy as changing the sign and changing the scope of business, and we should prevent too many hotels from taking such transformation together like a swarm of bees so as to avoid disorder and waste of resources in the sector. Without doubt, to transform a hotel business into an elderly care business, we should first consider the actual needs for elderly care in the place where the hotel is located and then suit our approach to the local circumstances. As for the elderly care services, the society not only expect an increase in the number of elderly care establishments, but also, and more importantly, expects higher quality. If there is no advantage in either service or price, even if a five-star hotel is turned into a house for the elderly, it would have to face crisis in its operation and eventually fails to meet the expectation of the public.