Luxury Chinese hotel offers to educate guests’ children while they work from home

In the wake of the ‘workation’, here comes the ‘studycation’

A room at the Mandarin Oriental Pudong (Mandarin Oriental)

A Chinese five-star hotel has offered to babysit children whose parents are working from home - even offering to supervise their education.

On 12 March, Shanghai’s authorities ordered locals and students to work and learn from home wherever possible following a rise in Covid cases, leaving lots of parents back working from home.

In response, the Mandarin Oriental Pudong has created a “Studycation” package for children aged seven to 16, where kids visit the hotel from Monday to Friday and have their studies supervised by a butler.

The package costs RMB 5,900 (£709) a week with three meals a day thrown in.

Parents can drop off their kids anytime after 7am and pick them up before 8pm.

“After the Shanghai municipal government issued its new policy that all students would have to stay home for online schooling starting from 12 March due to the recent Omicron outbreak, we have been witnessing the responses from our society and understood how difficult it was for the parents who had to juggle between their work and kids," Cecilia Yang, director of communications at the hotel, told CNN.

“During the past two years we already promoted ‘staycation’ and ‘workation’ package ideas when people were no longer able to travel freely like before...this time, [we thought] why not something for the kids?”

She says children benefit from the peace and quiet of the city hotel, while parents get back the space and time to do their work from home.

The hotel launched the concept on 16 March and has sold around 10 packages so far.

Workations emerged as a trend alongside the remote working revolution during the pandemic.

Many found hotels a calmer or more relaxing place to work, or simply valued the change of scenery.

Tour operator Tui has launched a whole website section dedicated to workation holidays, as have Melia Hotels, Barcelo Hotels and Barcelona tourism.