"Turning to selling pillows" becomes a new growth curve, Atour's retail revenue approaches 40%.

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On May 13, Atour Group (NASDAQ: ATAT) disclosed its financial data 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 was 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 2026 revenue guidance to a year-on-year increase of 24% to 28%.

Behind this outstanding report card, Atour’s core business model is undergoing a substantial shift. The explosive growth of its retail business is pushing it into a new valuation quadrant as a “brand retailer with accommodation scenarios.”

In terms of its accommodation base, Atour demonstrated strong operational resilience in the first quarter. Against the backdrop of rationalized macro consumption and industry-wide supply recovery, Atour maintained a slight price premium. Data shows that in the first quarter, Atour's average revenue per available room was 312 yuan, recovering to 102.4% of the same period in 2025.

The scale of expansion remained high, with 110 new hotels opening in the quarter and the total number of operating stores reaching 2,088, solidifying its presence at the “two-thousand-store” level.

At the same time, the number of directly operated stores further decreased to 19, and the asset structure continued to lighten. For franchisees, in the increasingly competitive mid-to-high-end hotel sinking market where “price wars” are frequent, whether Atour can continue to rely on product iteration (such as Atour 4.0) to maintain price per customer is the cornerstone for sustaining its future 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 increase of 54.4%, accounting for 38.1% of total revenue. This structural ratio 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 remodel hotel rooms into high-frequency offline experience venues. Guests complete “planting the seed of desire” in a closed scenario, then are directed to online e-commerce platforms.

This “what you use is what you buy” model, at a time when the traffic dividend has peaked, to some extent dilutes the initial customer acquisition cost. When the retail business approaches 40% of the total, the capital market’s assessment of Atour has partially moved away from the pure logic of room occupancy and begun to incorporate consumer goods retail valuation frameworks.

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

In the first quarter, Atour's hotel operating costs were 1.136 billion yuan, a significant increase of about 54% over the same period last year, slightly higher than overall revenue growth. The financial report attributes this to increased supply chain business costs and personnel costs resulting from hotel network expansion.

This means that under the complex “accommodation + retail” business model, back-end supply chain management difficulties are rising exponentially. As the scale of retail continues to expand, whether inventory management and logistics efficiency will distract from hotel management becomes a core concern for the market going forward.

In addition, as retail products increasingly enter public domain platforms from private traffic, high flow acquisition and marketing costs will directly test the management team's cost control capabilities. In the first quarter, sales and marketing expenses rose to 401 million yuan, with the absolute increase highlighting the cost barriers of cross-industry competition.

Overall, Atour’s first-quarter 2026 results have validated the financial viability of its “hotel + retail” model, and the raised annual guidance also demonstrates management’s expectations for business certainty this year.

But as the scale jumps, Atour’s real challenge lies in how to maintain the efficient operation of a vast supply chain amid rapid store expansion and cross-industry retail competition. Whether it can stabilize high gross margins under this complex dual-track operation will be the core proposition determining its future stock performance and the implementation of its corporate strategy.

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