My village resort
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Everyone told Herbert Bloembergen he was crazy when he tried leasing an entire village in southern China, near the picturesque limestone formations of Guilin. And when he told them about his plan to create a holiday retreat, they thought he was outright nuts.
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Herbert Bloembergen at the courtyard of his Open Inn at Chaolong village, Guilin. |
"In the Chinese mind, one goes from the village to the city, from an old house to a new house - not the other way around," the 45-year-old Dutchman says.
"So who would want to stay in the countryside in an old farmhouse somewhere off the main road?"
The answer is a lot of people.
But at that time, in 2003, the remote cluster of nine farmhouses in Chaolong village, outside of Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region's Yangshuo town, had largely been abandoned, as villagers opted for new abodes along a newly paved road.
Bloembergen says he had to finalize deals with the homeowners of this ghost town, and then repeat this process again and again with their brothers, cousins and increasingly distant relatives.
"I think I only managed to get all these people to agree because they all thought I was crazy," he says.
"They probably just thought, 'we get the rent for buildings we don't use, and we have nothing to lose really'."
Today, Bloembergen's Outside Inn is an acclaimed holiday retreat and a regular feature on the tourist map.
Its annual average occupancy rate is 45 percent, while more than 60 percent of rooms are full during peak season.
He has a range of single rooms (100 yuan - $14.64 - per night), doubles (120-170 yuan) and family rooms for four people (300-350 yuan).
The establishment is always totally booked for national holidays.
While word-of-mouth marketing helped Outside Inn grow its business, the recent purchase of advertising from Google has caused occupancy to surge, management says.
Most guests are moneyed expats, with Chinese accounting for about 5 percent of its business.
Outside Inn largely owes its success to the very location, which caused skeptics to scoff, Bloembergen says.
"I always find that tourists spent too much time in big, often enormous, cities and very little time in the countryside," he says. "I noticed with the Dutch tourists I was taking through China that people wanted to spend more time in the countryside."
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