In new trend, families seek home away from home

Wu Hao (right) and Tang Di, Airbnb contest winners, pose before spending a night among sharks in an underwater structure installed in the Aquarium of Paris. [Photo/Reuters]

A clean room to sleep in and a fully functional shower are no longer the only requirements that well-off Chinese travelers look for while booking hotel rooms these days.

As a surging number of families travel, demands for cooking facilities and space for kids to play are rising. Home away from home is what Chinese families seek during their travels. And specialist travel firms are cropping up to meet such demands.

Pan Caifu, vice-president of Xiaozhu, a Chinese online marketplace that enables travelers and homeowners to list, search and rent vacation homes, said that families are emerging as the driving force for the company's business growth. This is particularly true in times of nationwide holidays like the Oct 1-7 National Day holidays.

"More and more families travel with children under 18 these days. They are expected to shift from booking hotel rooms during vacations to reserving lodges through online platforms such as Xiaozhu, because non-standardized private apartments can better meet their needs," he said, adding a hotel room tends to be standardized everywhere and is practically just a bedroom.

"There is no kitchen for young parents to warm the milk for their babies, let alone making some basic meals. For families with older children, they would need living rooms to play or watch TV."

Founded in 2012, the Beijing-based Xiaozhu is similar to the United States-based Airbnb: It enables users to book spare rooms or apartments of others via a peer-to-peer model.

According to Pan, bookings on Xiaozhu platform and app jumped five times between 2014 and 2015. Bookings by traveling families with children aged under 18 surged 20 times during the same period.

As customers get older and mature, rents for properties listed on Xiaozhu have risen.

"Two years ago, the average age of our customers was 22. Most of them were college students who wanted to travel on the cheap. Now, our typical customers are middle-class families with an average age of 27. So, the average price of our listings doubled from 100 yuan ($15) a night," Pan said.

To attract more customers, especially family travelers during the National Day holiday, Xiaozhu has teamed up with Meituan-Dianping, a bulk-buying website in China that caters to groups. It has invested more than 100 million yuan to offer cash rebates to users. The company expects 80 percent of its orders to come from families during the holiday.

Besides Xiaozhu, companies such as Zhubaijia and Airbnb are focusing on providing home-like accommodation to China's outbound travelers with deep pockets.

Statistics from the China National Tourism Administration showed that China's travelers made more than 4 billion visits within the country in 2015 while outbound visits surpassed 120 million, the largest for any country.