Loving is giving

Shangri-La Hotel Beijing uses micro blog to make wishes come true, Ma Xue discovers.

Liang Linlin's wish for the upcoming International Children's Day is some new clothes for her parents. Liang wrote down the wishes on Shangri-La Hotel Beijing's office micro blog. "I want a jacket for my father's birthday," the third-year senior student from Dandelion secondary school wrote, "I can't remember when the last time he bought a jacket was."

Another item on the micro blog: He would be "over the moon" if he could get a pair of Li-Ning shoes for this Children's Day.

"All I really want is to watch a 3-D movie with all my classmates, I have never seen one of those," one of Liang's classmates wrote.

Unexpectedly, they got replies from the Shangri-La Hotel Beijing, which is collecting wishes for the children from migrant-worker families and working to help make them come true. When these wishes were posted on the hotel's official micro blog, they were forwarded more than 250 times within a few days.

"It saddens me just to go through this list of wishes," says the project organizer from the hotel, who asked not to be identified. "Those children are not asking for much and what took me by surprise is that quite a few of them are not even asking for presents for themselves.

"We as hoteliers are here to do whatever we can to help."

For this Children's Day, staff members from the Shangri-La Hotel Beijing are going to spend the day with students at Dandelion Secondary School, the first middle school specially built for migrant workers' children.

Employees from the Crowne Plaza Beijing Parkview Wuzhou hotel also share the passion for helping migrant workers' children.

On Children's Day, the hotel will take 40 students from Jinbangyuan Elementary School on a free day trip to Beijing's Blue Zoo Underwater World, with the fund entirely donated by Crowe Plaza Beijing Parkview Wuzhou hotel staff. Jinbangyuan Elementary School is built on the base of former Anningzhuang primary school to meet the growing educational needs of migration from rural areas.

The hotel is also creating a giant photo mosaic by collecting smiling faces of these children, which will be displayed in the hotel's lobby on Children's Day, June 1. One lucky child will win a two-night stay in the presidential suite at any of the of Shangri-La Group's hotels.

While trying each year to come up with new ideas for the annual celebration, many hotels also focus on long-term strategies that target family vacationers.

Swissotel Beijing has prepared a seasonally updated children menu created by a nutrition expert. It has also taken an extra step to anticipate younger clients' needs, by creating unique children's hotel rooms based on three different age groups, with such features as cuddly toys, cartoon books and videos.