Source丨Chuangyebang (ID: ichangyebang)
Author丨Shen San
Editing丨Xinling
Picture source丨Songzan Group
About 20 years ago, , known as the "little superman" in Hong Kong, Li Zekai , traveled on Shangri-La , and once joked with the Hong Kong hotel tycoon who was on the same car: Your "broken hotel" will charge us more than 1,000 US dollars every night. Do you know how much the hotel you stay in tonight costs?
The other party said lightly: 160! But at the same time, ask: Do you guess it is US dollars or RMB?
Li Zekai took it for granted: Of course it is US dollars.
The other party laughed; RMB!
Li Zekai found it incredible. Such a good hotel is only RMB 160, how can you make money? So after returning to the hotel, I took my fellow travelers to buy all the souvenirs from the gift department.
This hotel is called Songzan, located in Shangri-Lakna Village, Yunnan. Next to it is the largest Tibetan Buddhist temple in Yunnan: Songzanlin Temple.
At that time, Songzan had just been established and only one store was transformed from the ancestral home of founder Baima Duoji . The store has only 9 employees. Usually, they will share the same kitchen with customers.
Now, more than 20 years have passed, and Songzan Group has only opened 13 hotels and 2 tent camps in Yunnan and Tibet.
This is a very "slow" company.
But because of the slowness, it has done many things that other hotels are difficult to achieve.
For example, at least 10 years ago, it had a great reputation overseas. Those who came here were the British prince, later the US Treasury Secretary, the director of libraries and museums in Singapore, etc. At one time, 90% of Songzan's ring line customers came from overseas.
For example, TripAdvisor has rated Songzan as "25 Best Hotels in China" for many years; British aristocratic magazine "Tatler" listed it as "101 Best Hotels in the World"; American CNN listed it as "9 Best Hotels in China with the Best Scenic Spots in China...
The epidemic has made Chinese people who cannot travel abroad rediscover Songzan. In 2021, Songzan achieved the best results since its establishment, with revenue of 240 million yuan.
In the three years this year, they also started their first institutional financing - China Merchants Bank's financial service institution China Merchants Bank invested 300 million yuan, accounting for 21% of the shares.
Built in the most beautiful place
Songzan's hotel is the most praised by tourists. The first thing that tourists say is the scenery.
The entire Yunnan-Tibet region is because the three rivers flow together and Hengduan Mountains , and there is never a shortage of beautiful scenery. But they did the earliest things to combine modern hotel facilities with scenery.
Songzanlai Gushan Residence Snow Mountain, glaciers and lakes outside the window; Kawaborg outside the window of Songzan Meili Mountain Residence; Lancang River Canyon and Nujiang Canyon ; valleys and snowy mountains outside the window of Nangabawa Residence; quiet villages and rice fields in the valley outside the window of Tacheng Residence...
Source: Songzan Group
For the scenery - in Baimadoji's words, they are all places where the camera is placed - they are inevitably remote, sometimes, even deliberately remote.
The residence of Songzan Benzilan Mountain is just a small sandba in the upper reaches of the Jinsha River. There are only 13 households in the village; Gujionong Village, where Meilishan lives, there are only 5 households; Dalin Village, where Nangabawa Mountain lives, and 20 households in the village.
Even in Lhasa, they did not choose to be in the city, but for a quieter environment, in order to open the window, you can see Potala Palace , keeping the hotel away from the city.
Of course, there are not only scenery outside the window, but also the rich culture of Yunnan and Tibet is just like the local ecology.
Tibetan culture is the mainstream here.In addition to Songzanlin Temple and the Potala Palace, there are also the Damo Cave not far from Tacheng Mountain Residence, the traditional craft wooden lacquerware of Benzilan , and the handmade prayer flags around Songzanlinka... In addition, Lijiang Linka's Dongba Culture , the church established a century ago outside the window of Czanshan Residence, and the wine brought by French missionaries cannot be ignored.
Every hotel in Songzan is trying to provide tourists with rich scenery and culture, not to mention that this is still a Tibetan hotel.
The buildings of the hotel basically use wooden or stone traditional Tibetan styles and craftsmanship; interior decoration, the same traditional Tibetan style: Tibetan wooden furniture, Tibetan carpets, wooden ware, and hand-made bronze ware are all "standard" of the hotel.
Therefore, Songzan is also called a museum-type boutique hotel by ethnic culture researchers.
's pursuit of traditional craftsmanship is not an easy task.
Take Songtsen Lhasarinka as an example. During the design stage, the former director of the Industrial Department of the Tibet Cultural Department, Nima Tsering , participated in the design guidance, and he was responsible for the maintenance of many Tibetan temples including the Potala Palace. During the construction of
, in order to solve the structural and construction problems of traditional Tibetan buildings, he recommended two local craftsmen who have been doing cultural relics repair.
Baima Doji originally wanted to let the two men take some guidance every once in a while. But the two of them are on the construction site every day, because even in Lhasa, such large-scale traditional Tibetan-style building construction is rare.
Therefore, after completion, not only foreign tourists, but even many Lhasa locals are willing to come to this hotel.
Remote "modernization"
In remote and wild places, it is not easy to provide modern hotel services.
road construction, connect water, electricity, and network, and all hardware-related matters can be solved ultimately.
zhihu has a question: What difficulties will you encounter when building a boutique hotel in China? Songzan founder Baima Doji once answered in 2014. He mentioned three points at that time:
First, traditional construction technology and handicrafts are lost, and craftsmen are lacking;
Second, establishing a high-standard and local characteristics service system in relatively underdeveloped areas, and lacking talents;
Third, lacking customers. The dilemma of traditional craftsmanship in
can be seen in the construction of Lhasa Linka.
This also made Baima Doji cherish all good traditional craftsmen when they saw good traditional craftsmen. He supported a traditional Tibetan bronze craftsman and has been creating various utensils for Songzan to avoid the loss of the craftsmanship. What is more difficult is the service talents of modern hotels.
There is a sentence in the brand manual of Songzan Hotel:
"I hope the first time the guests come is because of the scenery outside the window; then, it is because of the people here!"
Source: Songzan Group
For hotels, people are service! For a Tibetan hotel like Songzan, people are still the link to convey culture. After the completion of
, Songzan Linka also recruited a group of foreign service personnel, but in the end it was unable to keep them. What's more, it is almost an inevitable choice for places such as Gu, Cizhong, and Benzilan, where there are only more than ten families - the service staff should be localized as much as possible.
. Many of the local employees recruited by Songzan may only have junior, high school or even elementary school education, do not understand English, and some even cannot speak Chinese well.
In 2008, Songzan introduced international hotel management agencies to try to build a European standardized and standardized management system.
The British hotel manager from Hong Kong came from Hong Kong. After more than a month of training, he felt that it was difficult for the employees to meet their requirements, so he went to Baima Doji to report.
Founder Baima Duoji, Source: Songzan Group
Baima Duoji said, do you think it is easy for me to replace more than 100 waiters, or is it easy for me to replace a manager?
In the end, Songzan can only rely on himself in terms of management.
This seems to be a path Songzan has to take, and he also takes it very patiently.
In 2021, Songzan Nangabawa Mountain Residence opened. Among the 15 local employees, 13 will start by learning Chinese.
CEO Zhishi Qilin of Songzan Hotel said: Three years won’t work, then it takes five or ten years to start teaching Chinese bit by bit and cultivate them.
Currently, more than 90% of Songzan’s more than 800 employees are locals, and they are from the countryside where the hotel is located, and more than 50% of them have junior high school education below.
Among them, Songzan Tacheng Mountain Residence achieved localization in 2017, including the store manager, and all 17 employees came from local villages.
Baimadoji said in a speech that he wanted to "smile with a simple smile".
On the Internet, in addition to being considerate and thoughtful, tourists' evaluation of Songzan's services also include words such as "simple", "heartfelt", and "like family".
But Songzan has a much more difficult problem than these three points to establish a hotel in a remote area.
In Baima Duoji's words, my country's land use planning will only reach the county level, and very few will go to townships. Not only is Songzan impossible to build it in a county town, but it is also impossible to build it in a township.
Therefore, the approval procedures for many hotels after the location selection often take two or three years, or even longer. At the end of last year, he said in an interview that there was a project that had been gone for 5 years and had not yet been completed.
The good news is that in recent years, the government has paid more and more attention to the development of tourism in western Yunnan, especially in Yunnan, and hopes to build the "Mid-mountain" hotel into one of its own tourism labels.
"ring line"
"ring line" is another major feature of Songzan.
The so-called "ring line" not only refers to the fact that Songzan spreads the hotels along the scenic spots in Shangri-La and later the Yunnan-Tibet Line. It also means that while Songzan sells rooms, it can also take guests to travel along the hotel, live in the past one by one - enter from Yunnan and finally arrive in Lhasa; enter from Tibet and finally arrive in Shangri-La.
In this process, from one hotel to the next, Songzan will provide pick-up and drop-off services - drivers must have a driving experience of more than 10 years, and the vehicles are mainly Land Rover , and there are also commercial vehicles such as BMW , Mercedes-Benz , Toyota and other commercial vehicles.
In addition, there is also a travel butler service. A dedicated person will accompany the guests on a trip.
It is said that Songzan is the first hotel in China to create a circular line concept.
Baimadoji said that he was inspired by Amankora of Bhutan.
Aman Hotel has 5 Amankora in Bhutan, allowing tourists to complete a full Bhutan tour like Kora. Therefore, since 2008, he has been thinking about the possibility of this layout.
first completed the Shangri-La Grand Circle; in 2015, he entered Tibet, and now 12 Songzan hotels are spread out from Lijiang to Tibet, until Lhasa.
In the room of Lhasa, source: Songzan Group
ring line layout of supporting tourism routes greatly enhances customer stickiness.
The Yunnan-Tibet Line, with high mountains and deep valleys, transportation is difficult, not to mention that the hotel location in Songzan is often more remote. Sales of travel routes not only solve the traffic problems of tourists, but also provide more thoughtful services, but also make hotel sales relatively easy - tourists do not book one night at a time, but multiple nights in different hotels in Songzan.
Songzan Travel Line Sales began in 2011.
At that time, local infrastructure was updated, and many roads had not been repaired. When connecting hotels, you often need to drive at both ends. When you arrive at a place where the road is still being built, tourists get off and walk for a while, and then get on another car.
Even so, the product sold 108 people that year, followed by 800 people and 1,300 people...
By the end of 2015, the room revenue driven by ring travel accounted for 70% of the total revenue.
sells travel routes, which requires Songzan to sort out the travel experience around the hotel to form a complete tourism product.
The advantages of employee localization are reflected - no one knows better where is more beautiful than them.
So, in the villager's residence, the villagers will take turns to lead horses and tourists to see glaciers and lakes; in the Meili Mountain residence, the tourists can go to the villagers' homes to print prayer flags by hand.
and even many hotel ingredients are purchased in surrounding villages. Some hotels also have their own vegetable gardens, which tourists can pick and present on their own dining tables when they eat.
CCTV director starts a business
Baima Doji was born in a small village named Kner in Shangri-La.
kner, Tibetan means: under the castle. According to him, during the Tubo period, there was a castle on the hillside next to it.
After Baima Doji joined the work, he went to Beijing to study due to the opportunity. Later, he stayed on CCTV and became a documentary director.
html In the 390s, he shot a large number of documentaries about Tibetan areas. A colleague from CCTV International Department used it for a translation and thought it was too beautiful, so he went on a trip. When he came back, he told him that beauty is beauty, but the conditions in the place where he lives were too poor.
Baima Doji always felt that he owed them. Around 2000, he told his family to transform his ancestral house into the first hotel, Songzan Green Valley Mountain Residence.
At that time, there were only 9 people in the store, including family, relatives, and neighbors. As executive director and Tian Zhuangzhuang , he officially resigned in 2004 and came back to concentrate on running a hotel.
Therefore, Songzan also heard about Li Zekai's story later. At that time, he was still working as a director at CCTV.
Songzan Green Valley starts and operates very difficult. When the hotel was completed, Baima Doji took 1.3 million yuan in debt. After that, it took a long time to gradually improve.
Sun Nuoqilin, one of the first nine people, also went to transport for a while and earned 100,000 yuan a year, which is more than the entire hotel in a year. He did not return until 2008 and is currently in charge of the entire fleet of Songzan; farmers with junior high school education, who have joined the army and retired, also joined the earliest team of 9 people. At first, she only knew how to change light bulbs, but now she is one of the main people in charge of the construction of Songzan New Store;
Zhuang Yueying, Baima Doji's sister, said that she was just a "cowherd kid", and after her family was transformed into a hotel, she became a waiter. In 2009, he began to learn hotel management with Frenchman Patrick - starting from learning how to use computers, and became the general manager of Lhasarinka in 2017.
This is the growth of Songzan’s initial team in the information you can see at present.
Baima Doji later ordered the principle for Songzan: "Songzan in the front desk, international in the back desk." Therefore, it is inevitable to absorb fresh blood.
In 2015, a startup company composed of three young people joined Songzan.
Zhishi Qilin, also from Kner Village, was born in 1985. After finishing college in Beijing, he entered China Youth Travel and later started a business with two other people to do high-end customized trips in Tibet.
Baima Doji invited them to Songzan many times. It is said that what conquered them in the end was a sentence from Baima Doji: "You don't understand life, how to do high-end customized travel."
Now, Zhishi has become the CEO of Songzan, and two other young people, Danzhen has become the head of the project development department, and Lausanne is the director of Songzan's travel operation center.
In addition, Lausanne, general manager of Songzan East Tibet Operation Center, once went abroad from Tibet to study, first learn English and then learn good Chinese; Ram, who started working as a guest room director in Lhasa Linka in 2018, was also working in hotels in Canada, and returned to China because his son would definitely learn Tibetan...
So, Baima Doji said that there are also international talents among Tibetans. Of course, Songzan's management team is not only Tibetan .
Zhang Min, deputy general manager of Songzan Group and general manager of the hotel operation center, is from Kunming. He joined Songzan in 2005. At that time, the team was only more than a dozen people; Wu Guijun, executive chef of boutique mountain residence, was born in Jinjiang near Lijiang in 1991. He left home at the age of 14. Later, he learned to cook, opened his own store, worked as a teaching position, and joined Songzan.
In April 2020, Cai Jinghui, former president of Qiongyou.com and tourism industry for nearly 20 years, also joined Songzan and became the group's chief strategic officer.
The financing in March this year was completed by him.
Going out of the Tibetan cultural area
20 years, Songzan has had many investors, but has always been unwilling to face institutional investors.
First in 2002, a Singaporean , because of the same philosophy, Baima Doji accepted the investment. Later, there were more than 20 investors, most of whom had stayed in hotels and thought it was very good, so they had to invest.
. For institutional investors, Baimadoji believes that the company can go public, but does not want any specific time to be a listing node. Therefore, those who have clear exit time requirements will be rejected.
In March this year, after accepting the 300 million yuan investment from China Merchants Bank International, Baima Doji published an article: "A Letter to Songzan Family" to dispel the concerns of employees and the outside world - Will the original intention change after Songzan Hotel raises funds?
letter mentioned: Before
financing, Zhishi Qilin met China Merchants Bank International for the first time and asked: "If you invest in Songzan, what are your biggest expectations?"
China Merchants Bank International replied: "Keep your original intention, don't change, Songzan, don't change, I hope you can always do difficult and correct things."
One of Songzan's original intentions is to become a world-class brand rooted in land and connect to the countryside.
Baimadoji said that when you see other investment institutions, you need to explain to the other party why you have such an original intention. China Merchants Bank International was the first to actively ask Songzan to maintain its original intention - they agree with Songzan's value to the countryside. In addition to the funds of
, an investor believes that Songzan will be able to combine with China Merchants Bank's high-net-worth customers to stabilize customer acquisition channels and reduce customer acquisition costs.
However, Liu Su, chairman of OCT Resort Hotel Management Company and founder of "Youji" vacation brand (formerly chairman of Huajiantang), believes that customers still need to rely on the influence of Songzan's own brand.
Hotel brand influence must be based on high-quality experience and service as always. Among them, the training of front-line employees is still a problem that needs to be solved for Songzan.
Baimadoji once mentioned that some hotel employees have lost a lot in recent years. Young people in rural areas yearn for cities more.
He is planning to establish Songzan Academy, which is dedicated to cultivating talents, from skills to career planning, and put it in Kunming to do it.
At present, Songzan is developing a huge plan to cover the entire Tea Horse Ancient Road .
On July 1 this year, the Songzan Pu'er Green Valley Hotel opened in the northern Wetland Park of Pu'er City, Yunnan Province. Along the Tea-Horse Road, Songzan began to extend southward.
This is the first time Songzan has truly stepped out of the Tibetan cultural area.
For Baimadoji, Songzan is a path to Shambala . In ancient Tibetan legends, Shambala means a place of happiness and tranquility, similar to: a paradise.
