Orange Hotel: Wangjing Room

It’s a hotel that defies strict categorisation. It’s not what you’d expect a low cost hotel to look like. It’s not what you’d expect a design hotel to be priced at. It’s also not what you might expect a hotel to be called.

Which is probably the reason why the Orange Hotel Group, set up by serial entrepreneur Wu Hai, is getting the media attention, investor interest and customer reviews it is.

His own people struggles with the definition. My conversation with his vice president-marketing Jessie So mainly revolved around how they were trying to find the right terms to describe the hotel.

When it was launched, they used the words “budget boutique”. But no one understood that in China. Then they changed to “designer hotel” but then customers outside China automatically associated that with “high price”. Now they are trying the three H – high design, high quality, high value.

Its English website calls it “a fusion between design and style for the discerning, budget conscious traveler” and “high value boutique style”.

Left: Crystal lobby

It’s not something Wu Hai spends sleepless nights on but you can tell it’s on his mind. “We don’t want people to think of us as low cost because of our prices because our product is not low cost,” he said.

What he’s doing therefore is to deliver different sets of information to different customers.

Curious about the product, I visited the Orange Hotel in JingSong East in Beijing’s Chaoyang District. While the sense of arrival is not ideal – it’s hidden at the back of a factory-like building with poor ventilation – once you get into the lift, you enter a different space.

Use of strong and colourful graphics lend colour and vibrancy to the lobby. A black-and-white African motif wraps the walls of the lobby. There’s a small café, the only f&b outlet. The rooms are spacious and well laid out – everything you’d want in a business hotel or a weekend getaway place, which are the customers it’s getting.

Wu Hai tries to differentiate Orange with personal touches – not personal service because he knows he can’t compete in that area with the luxury brands.

In each room, he leaves a personal letter to guests, thanking them for the support through difficult times. His letter also states that his company is privately-owned and not government-funded.

“Through this, we hope our customers feel empathy for us and maybe, some guy will put it on the Internet and compare us with the insurance sector which paid millions of dollars in bonuses to its staff, and create good word of mouth for us.”

In each room too is a Rubik’s cube and an individually-named fish. That’s 1,750 Rubik’s cubes and fish throughout the group.

Right: Jingsongdong lobby

Wu Hai wanted oranges but unfortunately, the fruit is seasonal. He also decided to call it “Orange”, inspired by Steve Jobs’ Apple. “If a computer company can be called Apple, why can’t a hotel company be Orange?”

His biggest challenge is to deliver a consistent experience across his 1,750 rooms with his 800-strong employee force. Currently, 90% of his business comes from within China but Wu Hai would clearly like to increase the foreign mix.

He currently receives foreign customers who’ve heard of the group via word of mouth and through the Internet. His issue is finding enough good English-speaking staff. At the hotel I visited, none of the staff, including the manager, could speak English.

It is why he believes it is also not the right time to take the Orange brand overseas. “We have no expertise in the international market. Maybe later when we hire international managers and find foreign investors, then we can expand.”

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