Qin Jie

Overlooking Maxim's Nursing Home. Photo courtesy of the scenic spot

In recent years, Meixin Wine Town, a national AAAA-level scenic spot located in Fuling District, has explored a new path of "caring for the elderly and enjoying the elderly, and consumption with family affection" by building the country's first "scenic embedded" nursing home - Meixin Nursing Home.

Different from the closed model of traditional nursing institutions, Maxim's Nursing Home adopts a semi-open model, where the elderly are not only residents of the scenic spot, but also "park owners" - they either dance with tourists in the dance hall, or make tea with tourists around the stove in the courtyard, and even become "life coaches" to tell life stories to young tourists.

"I always felt lonely in a nursing home before I moved in, but now I can see different tourists coming and going every day, and I can chat with them, and I feel young!" 85-year-old Grandma Zhou said. The program rehearsed by her and her old sisters has also become a special performance for various activities in the scenic spot.

This innovative model not only allows the elderly to regain social value, but also gives birth to a new scenario of "family consumption". Nursing homes have opened "family suites" to encourage family members to "vacation-style family visits". According to statistics, the average annual visit frequency of family members in the nursing home is very high, which is a great improvement compared with the traditional nursing home, and also drives the growth of secondary consumption in the scenic spot.

Wang Li, the person in charge of Maxim's Nursing Home, revealed that the nursing home and the park form a complementary ecology: the elderly enjoy the rights and interests of free scenic spots, and family members can enjoy internal discounts for consumption. This model increases the time that family members spend with the elderly, and truly makes the elderly physically and mentally happy.

It is understood that the project relies on the advantages of millions of tourists per year in the scenic spot to reduce the cost of pension, advocate "affordable pension", and reshape the social role of the elderly through "intergenerational integration". This "pension + cultural tourism" model solves the island effect of traditional pension and provides new ideas for the development of the silver economy. (Tian Zhong)