"Making pillows" transforms into a new growth curve as Atour's retail revenue approaches 40%.

On May 13, Atour Group (NASDAQ: ATAT) disclosed its financial results for the first quarter of 2026.

In the first quarter, Atour achieved revenue of 2.811 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 47.5%; adjusted net profit of 490 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 42.0%; adjusted EBITDA was 716 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 51.1%. At the same time, the company raised its full-year revenue guidance for 2026 to a 24% to 28% year-on-year increase.

Behind this impressive report card, Atour’s core business model is undergoing a substantive shift. The explosive growth of its retail business is pushing the company toward a new valuation quadrant as a “brand retailer with accommodation scenarios.”

In terms of accommodation fundamentals, Atour demonstrated strong operational resilience in the first quarter. Against the backdrop of rationalizing macro consumption and the overall industry supply rebound, Atour maintained a slight price premium. Data shows that in the first quarter, Atour’s average revenue per available room (RevPAR) was 312 yuan, recovering to 102.4% of the same period in 2025.

Scale expansion remained high, with 110 new hotels opened in the single quarter, bringing the total number of operating hotels to 2,088, formally securing its place in the “two thousand hotel” echelon.

At the same time, the number of self-operated stores was further reduced to 19, continuing to lighten the asset structure. For franchisees, whether Atour can continue to rely on product iteration (such as Atour 4.0) to maintain its price per customer amid frequent “price wars” in the mid-to-high-end hotel market, is the cornerstone of its subsequent store expansion speed.

The biggest variable in the financial report comes from the retail business.

In the first quarter, Atour’s retail business revenue reached 1.071 billion yuan, a year-on-year surge of 54.4%, accounting for 38.1% of total revenue. This structural proportion is extremely rare in the traditional chain hotel industry.

Atour’s current business logic is to use core products such as the “Deep Sleep” series to reshape hotel rooms into high-frequency offline experience spaces. Guests complete the “planting of desire” in a closed environment, which then funnels them to online e-commerce platforms.

This “what you use is what you buy” model, to some extent, dilutes the initial customer acquisition cost in an era where traffic dividends are peaking. As the retail business approaches 40% of the total, the capital market’s lens on Atour is gradually moving away from a pure room occupancy rate logic and toward a consumer goods retail valuation framework.

However, while the dual-engine model boosts overall revenue, it also exposes structural cost pressures and operational friction.

In the first quarter, Atour’s hotel operating costs were 1.136 billion yuan, a sharp year-on-year increase of approximately 54%, slightly higher than the overall revenue growth rate. The financial report attributes this to rising supply chain and personnel costs accompanying the hotel network’s expansion.

This means that under the complex “accommodation + retail” business model, back-end supply chain management becomes exponentially more difficult. As retail volume continues to expand, whether inventory management and logistics efficiency will dilute the hotel management team’s focus is a core concern for the market going forward.

In addition, as retail products gradually move from the private domain to compete on public platforms, high traffic acquisition and marketing costs will directly test management’s cost control capabilities. Sales and marketing expenditures in the first quarter rose to 401 million yuan, and the absolute increase in value signals the barrier costs of cross-sector competition.

Overall, Atour’s Q1 2026 results have proved the financial feasibility of its “hotel + retail” model, and the upward revision of full-year guidance also demonstrates management’s optimism for business certainty within the year.

However, as the company scales up, Atour’s real challenge lies in how to maintain efficient supply chain operations amid rapid hotel expansion and cross-industry retail competition. Whether it can sustain high gross margins in a complex dual-track operation will be the core issue determining its future stock performance and implementation of corporate strategy.