As this year's Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays combine into an extended Golden Week, many travelers have already booked their flights and hotels well in advance. Increasingly, young people are setting new expectations for hotel selection: not only must hygiene and safety standards be met, but the property must also be "photo-worthy."

A group of undergraduates from Tongji University discovered through their research that the vast majority of traditional hotels in county-level markets face an awkward situation 鈥?their physical spaces serve merely as lodging venues and have not been precisely mined and designed into content scenes. Guests find "nothing worth photographing," and even when they do take photos, there is a lack of convenient creative tools, causing a large amount of potential organic traffic to be wasted. The students keenly spotted the business opportunity, seized the demand, and now provide hotels with one-stop solutions spanning scene renovation to digital operations.

A Wenhui Daily reporter learned that this student-founded startup has not only successfully revived an established five-star hotel in a county-level market but also secured new orders from two additional hotels this year, with team members earning their first pot of gold while still enrolled.

The "Xinglv Huanxin" team posed for a photo at the National Pillar on the Tongji University campus.

"Nowadays, a hotel that can produce beautiful photos during a trip is no longer an optional add-on for consumers 鈥?it is a core requirement," said Yang Mei, project leader and a third-year undergraduate student at Tongji University's School of Arts and Media. In her research, she found that in the social media era, the advertising conversion efficiency of genuine user shares is three to five times that of official brand placements. Before this venture, she conducted field studies visiting dozens of benchmark accommodation spaces worldwide and completed a comprehensive examination of China's three major homestay clusters, forming first-hand knowledge of spatial planning in the hotel industry. She also participated as a member of the directing team in visual design for CCTV Spring Festival Gala venues and planning for international audiovisual art carnivals, building an understanding of narrative logic, spatial choreography, and aesthetic expectations across various project sites.

Yang Mei said: "Traditional high-end hotels are not lacking in hardware 鈥?what they lack are content scenes that make young people 'want to photograph, want to post, want to share.'"

Seizing the new consumer trend, Yang Mei assembled a cross-disciplinary "Xinglv Huanxin" team on campus to start the venture. These undergraduates dared to think and act boldly, setting their sights on hotel groups in new consumption growth points outside core metropolitan areas and tourism destination cities. "This is a 'value depression' that has been squeezed by boutique homestays and neglected by the cultural tourism market in recent years," Yang Mei said. The team's goal is not to help hotels do a one-time influencer-style makeover, but to make every guest a brand ambassador for the hotel.

Project leader Yang Mei meeting with clients.

In August 2025, the team first moved into a county-level five-star hotel in Zhejiang. At the time, the hotel was facing a crisis of declining brand memorability and a severe drop in social media mentions caused by its standardized service model. The team did not rush to "make cuts" but instead spent 48 hours on-site to understand the property's "family assets," then deployed a "combination punch": at the spatial level, they renovated the hotel's public areas into highly "photo-worthy" scenes, giving every corner viral potential; at the cultural level, they deeply mined local intangible cultural heritage and folk resources, planning immersive experience activities with local distinctiveness; at the technological level, they launched an intelligent content management platform to lower the creative threshold for guests and make sharing achievable with one click.

The "Xinglv Huanxin" team's related renovation plans.

Eleven months later, the data provided the answer: the hotel's monthly revenue and revenue per available room rose significantly, and monthly social media mentions and average monthly user-generated content output both increased markedly 鈥?meaning the hotel is transforming from "needing to be promoted" to "worth being shared."

"Previously, the hotel relied on online travel platforms to buy traffic and attract guests. Now guests post on Xiaohongshu themselves to bring us traffic," commented a manager at the hotel involved.

The pilot's success gave the team a "stepping stone." This year, two more hotels have signed letters of intent to cooperate with the team. Currently, the project has established Shanghai Jixinglv Network Services Co., Ltd. Yang Mei explained that the company adopts a compound profit model of "base service fee + subscription fee + incremental revenue sharing," focusing on the Yangtze River Delta and Shandong regions in the short term, striving to sign three to five high-end hotels by 2026.

"What we do is not a one-time design renovation, but helping hotels build a self-circulating system of 'space鈥揷ontent鈥搕raffic,'" Yang Mei said. "When guests spontaneously become brand communicators, the hotel's marketing cost structure fundamentally changes."

On this journey, they are not fighting alone. The reporter learned that Tongji University's School of Arts and Media has also helped the team connect with cultural tourism industry resources and local government cooperation channels, further grounding the students' entrepreneurial vision.

Original title: "Photo-Worthy Stays Become New Hotel Opportunity! Tongji Undergrads Offer Tailored Makeovers to Revive Struggling Properties"

Column editor: Jiang Peng. Image source: Provided by interviewees.

Source: Author: Wenhui Daily, Wu Jinjiao.