National Day holiday triggers surge in short-term home-rental as hotel prices skyrocket
With the upcoming eight-day National Holiday, there has been a surge in searches for domestic and overseas travel on online booking platforms such as Trip.com.
People on social media are venting about hotel room prices soaring during the holiday. In some cases, pent-up demand is allowing hotel and resort operators to raise prices by as much as ten times during the holiday.
For example, a hotel room in Qingdao, Shandong Province, has gone up more than ten times from 71 yuan to 778 yuan (US$106.49).
Prices searched before and during the eight-day national holiday.
To save money, some young people have come up with the idea of renting out their own homes during the upcoming holiday on lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu and second-hand market app Xianyu.
Posts on holiday home rentals on Xiaohongshu.
Such posts can be found with tags of popular travel destinations such as Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen, Changsha, and Xi'an.
In some of the posts, some listed their reasons for renting out their home, such as the apartment being vacant anyway, so they might as well use it to make some money and make a few friends.
Pet-owners can also ask the holiday tenants to help them feed their pets and keep them company.
A pet-owner in Beijing is looking for a tenant during the holiday. The tenant will need to take care of the owner's pets.
Quite a lot of the posts specified only women or couples are wanted.
Some of them require the tenants to show their ID cards and their credit status on Sesame Credit, a private credit scoring system developed by Ant Group.
Instead of daily rental, more people are looking for tenants who are willing to rent their apartments for the whole holiday.
Also, posts on home-swapping are on the increase.
However, there are risks for short-time apartment rentals to keep in mind, such as when tenants accidentally break the apartment owner's appliances and belongings or if they get hurt in the apartment, said
Fu Jian, director with Zejin Law Firm in Henan Province. When the owner and tenants don't sign any contract or register personal info, it will be hard to protect both parties' rights.
A home owner in Wuhan, Hubei Province, is looking to swap home with anyone who's up for it during the holiday.
Also, when the apartment owners don't have qualifications to rent their properties, they might face an administrative punishment, Fu added.
