The most talked-about topic in the internet industry recently revolves around major companies' shifts between "anti-involution" and "re-involution." While employees struggle under the pressure of 360-degree reviews, OKR alignments, and elimination of the lowest performers, KPIs seem like a sword of Damocles hanging over everyone's head. In this business climate, if a company suddenly announced, "We are completely eliminating all negative review KPIs; customer feedback will no longer be a performance metric," you might think the boss has lost their mind or the company is on the verge of collapse. However, this was a real decision made in 2025 by a Chinese company listed on Nasdaq with annual revenue approaching $10 billion. This company is Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited, an atypical enterprise labeled by the outside world as a "mid-to-high-end hotel" but one that has remarkably sold billions worth of pillows. Through this seemingly反常 decision, we can glimpse a profound management experiment hidden beneath its hotel exterior.
Mention Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited, and many people's first thought is that artistic hotel they stayed in during a business trip. But if you examine Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited's 2025 financial report, you'll find staggering data: full-year revenue of 9.79 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 35.1%; within this, retail revenue reached 3.67 billion yuan, accounting for nearly 40% and growing 67% year-on-year. A hotel company sold over 4 million deep-sleep pillows last year, with cumulative sales of the Deep Sleep Pillow Pro series exceeding 10 million units. This inevitably raises the question: Is this a hotel that's "neglecting its main duty" or a retail company disguised as a hotel?
From the perspective of Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited founder Yeli Yin, this is not跨界 but an inevitability. As early as 2018, when the company's retail revenue was less than that of a single加盟 hotel, he proposed the "crazy" idea to his team that retail would account for half of future revenue. This is because, from its inception, Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited's underlying logic was not "selling rooms" but "building a brand"—a lifestyle brand starting with accommodation. Hotels were merely the first载体 they chose; retail is a natural extension of the same concept into different scenarios.
To support such a lifestyle brand, the traditional budget hotel management model is clearly ineffective. The core of the traditional model is efficiency, cost, and return on investment, treating guests as transient figures on an assembly line. Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited chose a截然不同的 path: creating experiences through differentiation. Yeli Yin categorizes product differentiation into three levels: functional value, emotional value, and spiritual value. While most hotels remain at the level of functional differentiation through hardware and style, Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited attempts to ascend to emotional and even spiritual levels. However, experience is highly subjective and difficult to standardize. How can 2,000 locations nationwide consistently deliver high-quality experiences? Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited introduced Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's "peak-end rule." A person's evaluation of an experience is primarily determined by its peak and end. Based on this, the company decomposed previously vague services into 17 key touchpoints, "productizing service" much like an internet product. From "100% serving tea" upon a guest's entry (the initial moment), to three-minute check-in, complimentary room upgrades, and highly local breakfasts (peak moments), to offering a warm bottle of water upon departure (the final moment). These seemingly minor details are meticulously woven into a standardized network covering common needs. Simultaneously, through an "empowerment for all staff" mechanism, frontline employees are granted the flexibility to handle issues, allowing a personalized "neighborhood culture" to grow atop the standards. This "standardized personalization" has successfully built the brand's emotional value beyond its functional worth.
Yet, even the most perfect service design becomes纸上谈兵 without a vibrant organization to execute it. The hotel industry is inherently people-dependent but also极易陷入僵化和疲态. In the past, the industry普遍 used "budget completion rate" to evaluate hotel general managers. This seemingly scientific metric harbored significant unfairness: managers at prime locations with excellent resources could easily meet targets without much effort ("lying flat to win"), while those managing challenging properties struggled to meet budgets despite their best efforts, often leading them to "give up." To break this inertia of "bad money driving out good," Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited internally overturned the old system, pioneering a "bi-weekly championship"考核机制. In this arena, you don't compete against others but against yourself—specifically, against your average performance over the past six weeks. The evaluation dimensions also moved beyond solely revenue, incorporating a comprehensive score based on income, profit, user experience, and staff retention. Your previous score sets the baseline for your next evaluation. Top 5% performers receive promotions skipping levels, while the top 1% are promoted two levels at once. The introduction of this mechanism was like throwing a large rock into a calm lake, instantly activating the entire organization's competitive spirit. More ingeniously, it also solved the long-standing challenge in chain hotel management of "assigning managers to stores." Now, each store has data tags, and each general manager has a capability profile; decisions are data-driven, no longer reliant on personal connections or luck. Once fairness is established, people truly come alive.
While activating grassroots vitality, Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited's transformation of its mid-to-senior management teams was equally bold. To prevent management stagnation, the company launched an organizational reform known as the "Three Systems": Term System, Job Rotation System, and Open Recruitment System. For department heads at level 8 and above, a term is strictly limited to two years, with a maximum of one consecutive term, meaning an individual can stay in one position for no more than four years before rotating. Job rotation is a mandatory path for career advancement, and all key positions are filled through open recruitment, not seniority. This强制性流动机制 breaks down departmental silos, keeping managers敏锐 to the market and respectful of the business. An internal analogy at Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited vividly describes this: if organizations追求短期成果 are "buying apples," then Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited's approach is "cultivating its own apple trees." The roots of the tree are its values; only with deep roots can it continuously bear fruit. As Yeli Yin stated, competition in the hotel industry is essentially "replicative competition"—a good product idea or design style can be copied by competitors within months. Relying solely on hardware and decor can never defend a position. The real differentiator, the long-term moat, lies in the people you hire and the culture they collectively create.
However, corporate development is never a straight line; rapid growth often masks systemic risks. In June 2025, Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited faced a severe trust crisis. A guest staying at the Hangzhou Zijingang Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited hotel意外 discovered a hospital logo printed inside a pillowcase. The incident quickly gained traction online and trended, casting a shadow over the brand renowned for its experience. Facing the crisis, conventional PR would involve apologies, rectifications, and punishing those responsible. But Yeli胤's reflection did not stop at the superficial levels of process and operations; he directed the scrutiny towards deeper corporate management logic. He敏锐地察觉到 that the root cause of the incident was the company being held hostage by KPIs. For a long time, Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited relentlessly tracked negative review rates. The numbers looked good on the surface, but this was a classic case of "result-oriented" rather than "experience-oriented" management. Under the heavy pressure of strict negative review KPIs, employee behavior became distorted—their daily focus shifted from如何把服务做好 to如何避免差评, even being led by the nose by一些无价值的恶意差评. When employees' energy is consumed by应付指标, their warmth towards users naturally diminishes. It was基于这样痛定思痛的反思 that Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited made the decision that shocked the industry: completely取消 "review KPIs." This was not a compromise on service quality but an elevation of management philosophy. It was replaced by a more robust upgraded version of the "Peace of Mind Project." They incorporated fundamental hygiene requirements, like using disposable cloths for cleaning, into the SOP (Standard Operating Procedure), aiming to develop muscle memory through repeated execution. Externally, they established a dedicated hotline, promising guests not only clear compensation mechanisms for any issues found but also ensuring a closed-loop management process. Yeli胤 summarized the post-crisis transformation as the "Three Returns": Return to Users, Return to Partners, and Return to Fundamentals. In an era of flashy innovations, Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited realized that mastering these three returns holds more value than any eye-catching gimmick.
This reverence for fundamentals and commitment to user experience, in turn, became the underlying driver for the explosive growth of Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited's retail business. Traditional retail logic involves finding traffic and buying conversions, whereas Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited built a self-reinforcing flywheel based on "Audience-Scene-Experience." From its birth, the company精准锁定 the "new middle class" and those pursuing quality living. Its 2,000-plus hotels are no longer冰冷的客房 but 2,000 immersive product experience zones. When a weary business traveler enjoys a good night's sleep using a Deep Sleep Pillow in an Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited room, the trust built on this genuine experience is incomparable to any massive advertising campaign. Experience translates into purchase intent, and the hotel room naturally becomes the best point-of-sale for retail products. This dual-engine model of "accommodation + retail" not only significantly broadens the company's revenue boundaries but also赋予 it strong anti-cyclical capabilities. While the entire hotel industry faces pressure on occupancy rates and price wars during economic fluctuations, Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited's retail business acts as a stable ballast, supporting counter-cyclical growth.
While consolidating its position in the mid-to-high-end market, Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited has set its sights on more distant peaks. In early 2026, the company formally独立 its稳健运营的 4.0 version as the new brand "Atour Jianyé." This brand deeply traces its spiritual origins to the Atour Village in Yunnan, incorporating local elements like indigenous cloth, rammed earth walls, rattan weaving, and Lisu hieroglyphs into its modern空间设计 through contemporary interpretation. It spans both business and leisure travel segments, attempting to offer a sense of natural tranquility and emotional value amidst fast-paced urban travel. In the higher-end market, Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited launched "SAH," a brand对标 Aman. In the global luxury hotel market long dominated by欧美 brands, Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited aims to create a truly Chinese high-end brand in its own way. Surprisingly, in a Chinese business landscape accustomed to rapid expansion and scale, the company's approach to its luxury brand exhibits remarkable "restraint." Yeli胤 set a goal for the team: only 50 SAH properties in ten years. This克制放弃规模冲动 stems from the founder's deep historical knowledge and long-termism philosophy. Yeli胤 is an avid student of history, particularly the Ming and Qing dynasties and Zeng Guofan's military strategies. Zeng's philosophies of "building strong stockades and fighting steadfast battles" and "enduring烦琐" are deeply embedded in Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited's operating principles. In Yeli胤's view, building a luxury brand is like a spiritual practice, requiring patience to穿越时间. Blind expansion for short-term financial gains would only透支 the brand's vitality. Studying history taught him that the world cannot be fully comprehended, so judgment should be slow; every decision made today must withstand scrutiny decades or even a century later.
Hotels of the past were "remote offices," everything revolving around efficiency. Today's business travelers are more焦躁疲惫; what they are truly willing to pay for is a space that allows them to quiet down and recover. Whether it's "Atour Jianyé" or "SAH," which emphasizes "harmony born from tranquility, affecting both body and mind," Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited is attempting to provide spiritual value that soothes the soul.
From its founding in 2012 to today, Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited has journeyed for thirteen years. During this time, it has experienced the "valley of despair" with broken funding chains and faced fierce competition from rivals. But the company has始终坚持 "not viewing competitors as the real competition; the true对手 is the constantly evolving user demand." While the industry陷入同质化竞争的泥沼, Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited proposed its own破局之道 with the new three-year strategy of "Chinese Experience, Brand Navigation." They are not just operating an excellent hotel brand but are incubating and managing a vast ecosystem of lifestyle brands. When articulating the grand vision of a "Century-Old Atour," Yeli胤坦言: "Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited is 13 years old this year, still 87 years away from 100." This is not just self-encouragement but a profound insight into the essence of business management. In this era of uncertainty, many companies seek short-term prosperity by chasing trends and squeezing employees. Atour Lifestyle Holdings Limited's management experiment demonstrates that the real moat is not luxurious decor or clever marketing, but the organizational capabilities and cultural底蕴 that others cannot copy. When you dare to break conventions, treat employees as partners, users as friends, and every service interaction as an emotional connection, those seemingly unattainable business miracles might, at some unexpected moment, fall into place naturally.
Comments