Hotel Marketing China: Online Accommodation Strategies

More than 90% of Chinese travelers book their hotels online. And the platforms needed to attract Chinese tourists are completely different from those in the West.

China’s online accommodation market is projected to grow from USD 105.12 billion in 2025 to USD 120.98 billion in 2026, on its way to USD 244.14 billion by 2031, according to a recent industry forecast. For international hotel brands, understanding how Chinese travelers search, compare, and book has never mattered more.

At our agency, we’ve helped dozens of global hospitality brands adapt their marketing to China’s platforms and habits. From Baidu SEO to Xiaohongshu and Ctrip, we know what drives bookings, what builds trust, and what mistakes cost you Chinese guests.

Written by Philip Chen, CEO of GMA. Philip has spent over a decade running Baidu, Xiaohongshu, and OTA campaigns for hospitality brands, from family-owned boutique hotels to international resort groups looking to convert Chinese travelers into paying guests.

In this guide, we’ll share updated hotel marketing strategies for China’s online accommodation market: from Baidu and generative search to Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and the OTAs that actually move bookings in 2026.

Promoting Your Hotel to Chinese Travelers

Having a Chinese Website

Having a Chinese website is still the foundation. Most Chinese travelers are not fluent in English, so without a Chinese-language site, you’re invisible before you even start. Your site should present your property, list your services, and give you a place to run offers, such as a discount for guests booking direct instead of through a middleman.

Promote Your Hotel in China on Baidu SEO

Baidu remains the “Chinese Google” and, despite a volatile few years of competition from Bing, Sogou, and AI search, it still carries more than half of China’s search traffic in 2026. Google is essentially absent inside China. So Baidu is a step you can’t skip if you want your hotel to show up when a Chinese traveler searches for a place to stay.

• Traffic Acquisition SEO & SEM

If you want to use Baidu, host your website in China, or at least on a CDN with mainland edge nodes, so it loads fast. Slow loading kills your ranking before content even matters. Then earn visibility through SEM (pay-per-click, banners) and SEO: structured content, backlinks from Chinese forums and travel sites, and consistent publishing.

Generative Search: Baidu AI Overview, DeepSeek, and Doubao

This is the part that didn’t exist when we first wrote this guide. Chinese travelers now ask questions directly to AI search tools, Baidu’s AI Overview, DeepSeek, Doubao, instead of scrolling through ten blue links. WeChat itself has integrated DeepSeek into its own search, which means a well-optimized WeChat article can now surface as an AI-generated answer.

The mechanism is different from classic SEO. These models don’t rank pages, they synthesize an answer from whichever sources they judge trustworthy and well-structured. That means your content needs clear question-and-answer formatting, verifiable facts (star rating, distance to the airport, whether staff speak English or Mandarin-adjacent languages), and mentions across several credible Chinese sites, not just your own. A hotel that answers “is this a good place for a family with young kids” in plain language, on a page Baidu and DeepSeek can both parse, gets cited. A hotel that only has a glossy photo gallery does not.

Chinese Social Media are Best to Promote & Advertise Your Hotel Online

Social media is where trust gets built before a booking happens. If you’re not familiar with these apps, you can contact us for more information and tips.

• Weibo

Weibo is still one of China’s biggest social platforms, and it remains useful for PR moments, verified badges, and reaching a broad, older audience than Douyin or Xiaohongshu. It won’t be your main booking channel, but it builds the brand credibility that makes travelers trust you when they see you elsewhere.

• WeChat

WeChat still anchors everything else. An official account lets you publish updates like a blog or newsletter, and a WeChat mini-program turns that account into a booking tool, guests can check rates, message your front desk, and pay without leaving the app. If you haven’t set up a WeChat mini-program yet, this is the single addition most likely to pay off this year.

The best tools on WeChat

• A brochure mini-site presenting your property
• Articles and marketing content pushed to followers
• Vouchers and discounts sent directly to followers
• Community management inside groups
• A WeChat mini-program for direct booking and payment

• Douyin

Douyin has become a real booking channel for hotels, not just a place to be seen. Content featuring distinctive, experience-led hotels has generated 35 billion views on Douyin, with related hotel livestreams watched 130 million times, and during this year’s May Day holiday and summer peak, bookings for these hotels jumped 133% and 83% respectively, according to ChinaTravelNews.

The mechanism matters here. Douyin’s algorithm surfaces content based on what a user watches and engages with, not who they already follow, so a small independent hotel with a genuinely interesting video (the view from a specific room, a chef prepping breakfast, a staff member who speaks fluent Mandarin) can outrank a five-star chain with a bigger budget. A short video links straight to an in-app booking page, so a traveler can go from watching to reserving in under a minute. Working with a KOL (Key Opinion Leader) who already has an engaged travel audience speeds this up, but it isn’t a requirement anymore.

Xiaohongshu: The Platform Most Hotels Still Underuse

If you only add one new platform after reading this, make it Xiaohongshu. According to Jing Daily, Xiaohongshu now ranks as the top platform for destination research among outbound Chinese travelers, ahead of personal recommendations, travel agents, and every OTA combined.

The reason is structural. Xiaohongshu’s algorithm ranks posts (called “notes”) by saves and comments, not follower count, and it functions as a search engine as much as a social feed, our own breakdown of Xiaohongshu as a search engine goes into the mechanics. For a hotel, this means a handful of well-written notes from real guests or local KOCs (Key Opinion Consumers, smaller and more trusted than KOLs) answering practical questions, is there a Chinese-speaking contact, how far from the nearest airport, is breakfast included, can outperform a paid campaign. Read our full Xiaohongshu marketing strategy guide if you want to go deeper.

Response speed matters more here than on Western platforms. Chinese travelers frequently message a hotel’s account directly to confirm details before booking, and a slow or English-only reply loses the booking to a competitor who answers in Mandarin within the hour.

Make Good Use of Online Travel Forums

Chinese travel platforms still give travelers a lot of practical information: what to do, where to go, where to eat, and where to sleep.

• Lvmama.com（驴妈妈）

Lvmama is popular with independent travelers who skip group tours. It carries self-drive travel tips across China and lets users book attraction tickets directly at a reasonable price.

• Mafengwo.com (马蜂窝)

Mafengwo still provides some of the most detailed traveler-written guides online, with destination brochures, attraction tips, and millions of user reviews across China’s tourist destinations.

• Lvping（驴评网）and Daodao（到到网）

Lvping is a travel forum where Chinese tourists post reviews and feedback on flights and hotels, similar in function to TripAdvisor. Daodao, TripAdvisor’s own Chinese site, doesn’t book hotels directly, but its comments carry real weight with travelers deciding between two similar properties.

5. e-PR (Press Relations)

Doing PR in China still matters. It puts your property in front of a wide audience through appealing visuals combined with real guest testimonials, and online PR spend in the travel sector keeps growing year over year.

Register Your Hotel on Chinese (& Other) Online Booking Companies

A handful of online booking platforms dominate China, and their dominance keeps growing as Chinese travelers do more of their lives on their phones, hotel search included.

Trip.com Group, which owns Ctrip, now controls roughly 48% of China’s online hotel booking market. Over 80% of its revenue still comes from domestic Chinese travel, which tells you something useful: even the biggest platform is not enough on its own if your hotel is outside China, you still need visibility on the platforms Chinese travelers use for outbound trips specifically.

Chinese Online Booking Companies

Competition is fierce between these platforms as most of them now operate as super-apps, giving users access to a wide range of services on one site or app. Meituan, for example, offers everything from food delivery to group-buying deals and movie tickets on top of hotel booking, all inside one mobile app or its WeChat mini-program.

• Meituan (美团)

Meituan is not only famous for food delivery, it’s also one of the most popular hotel booking platforms in China, and it keeps gaining ground by cross-selling hotel vouchers to its existing food-delivery users, turning an impulse craving into an impulse booking. Meituan tends to be stronger in smaller cities with cheaper rooms, while Ctrip attracts more affluent travelers from Beijing and Shanghai with a bigger inventory of high-end hotels.

• Ctrip (携程)

Ctrip remains the biggest single platform for hotel bookings in China. It covers flights, hotels, tour packages, car rentals, and airport transfers under one roof, and it has operated since 1999, long enough to be the default habit for a large share of Chinese travelers booking domestic or outbound trips.

• eLong.com (艺龙)

eLong lists hotels and flights across every price tier, from budget rooms to luxury properties, including a selection of overseas hotels for Chinese travelers heading abroad, with regular discounts running throughout the year.

• Qunar (去哪儿)

Qunar remains one of the go-to platforms for price-sensitive travelers booking flights and hotels at a discount, and it typically undercuts other platforms on room rates.

Foreign Online Booking Companies

• Trip.com

Trip.com is Ctrip’s international arm. Compared to other booking sites, it holds the deepest inventory of Chinese-reviewed properties since it inherits Ctrip’s own hotel reviews, which is exactly why it outranks competitors on review volume.

• Agoda

Agoda, part of Booking Holdings, keeps pushing for a stronger position in China and across Asia Pacific. It’s an online travel agency and metasearch engine for hotels, vacation rentals, flights, and airport transfers, and unlike Trip.com Group, which distributes through Booking.com, Agoda works with Meituan and Fliggy.

• Booking.com

Headquartered in Amsterdam, Booking.com is a Dutch online travel agency for lodging reservations and a subsidiary of Booking Holdings. It carries limited weight with Chinese domestic travelers but still matters for the smaller share who book independently through Western platforms while traveling abroad.

• Expedia

Expedia is an online travel agency owned by Expedia Group, based in Seattle. Its app and website cover airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, cruises, and vacation packages, mostly used by Chinese travelers already comfortable booking on non-Chinese platforms.

How Dimitri’s Hotel Group Went From 15 to Over 400 Chinese Guests a Year

Dimitri runs a family-owned hotel group of three properties on Crete. Before working with a China-focused team, his hotels had an English-only website and a listing on Booking.com, and picked up around 15 Chinese guests a year, despite Crete’s rising profile among Chinese travelers looking for Mediterranean destinations beyond the usual Paris-Rome-Barcelona circuit.

His first attempt was translating the website into Chinese and adding a listing on Daodao, hoping visibility would follow. It didn’t move the needle. Chinese travelers rarely book through platforms they don’t already trust, and a translated site with no Baidu indexing is effectively invisible to Chinese search, no matter how good the translation is.

What actually worked was getting listed on Ctrip and Fliggy with content written for Chinese search intent, island-hopping itineraries, olive oil tasting, wedding packages, paired with three months of Xiaohongshu seeding through mid-tier KOCs, some based in Athens, some in Shanghai, who had genuinely stayed at the properties. The notes worked because they answered the exact questions a Chinese traveler asks before booking a Greek island stay: is English enough to get by, how far is the airport, is there a Chinese-speaking contact if something goes wrong.

Chinese guest nights went from under 50 a year to just over 400 in the following twelve months, and average stay length came in longer than the property’s overall average, a sign these were planned, considered bookings rather than impulse ones.

Further Reading: The Hotel Industry in China

Online hotel booking has become one of the most competitive digital businesses in China. Companies that spotted the opportunity early built platforms able to attract younger travelers and older generations alike, and booking a hotel in China today is faster and more convenient than it has ever been.

Outbound Travel is Back, and Booking Behavior Has Changed

Chinese outbound tourism has recovered past pre-pandemic levels, with travelers projected to make well over 200 million trips abroad in 2026 and outbound spending climbing toward USD 280 billion. What’s different from 2019 is how they’re booking. The market has shifted from group-tour dependency toward independent, AI-assisted trip planning, helped along by visa-free arrangements with more than 50 countries. That shift matters directly for hotels: independent travelers research more, compare more, and are far more influenced by Xiaohongshu notes and Douyin content than by a travel agent’s recommendation.

The Chinese Rating System for Hotels

From small, simple hotels (1-star) to giant luxury hotels (5-star), the size, quality, and standards of hotels in China vary as widely as customer expectations do. Star ratings give you a rough idea of what to expect, but what passes as a five-star hotel in China would rarely rate as a four-star property elsewhere.

Standards can’t be judged precisely from star ratings alone, since the approach to rating in China differs from the West. Hotels worldwide are rated from one to five stars by national and international bodies, with various systems like the HOTREC star system in Europe. In China, hotels are officially rated by the Chinese National Tourism Association (CNTA), and you can see CNTA star ratings reflected on booking sites like Ctrip.

Even when a Chinese hotel doesn’t match the facilities of an identically rated hotel in the US, tourism remains one of China’s fastest-growing industries, and hotels keep closing that gap fast, particularly in major cities and now increasingly in tier-2 and tier-3 destinations popular on Xiaohongshu.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a website hosted in China to rank on Baidu?

Not strictly, but it helps a lot. Hosting outside mainland China means slower load times for Chinese visitors, and Baidu factors speed into ranking. A CDN with mainland edge nodes gets you most of the benefit without a full China-based hosting setup, and it’s usually the more practical starting point for a single hotel or small group.

Which platform should I prioritize first, Ctrip or Xiaohongshu?

Get listed on Ctrip first, it’s the transactional layer, the place where a Chinese traveler actually pays. But Xiaohongshu is what gets them to Ctrip in the first place. If your budget only covers one channel this quarter, put it into Xiaohongshu content and get your Ctrip listing right organically before spending on ads there.

Do I need a Chinese business license to list on Meituan or Ctrip?

No. Foreign hotels list as international properties on both platforms without a Chinese entity. What you do need is a Chinese payment method connected, since most Chinese travelers won’t complete a booking that only accepts a foreign credit card.

How long before we see actual bookings from China?

Expect three to six months before Xiaohongshu and Baidu content start converting into direct bookings, since Chinese travelers plan international trips 50 to 90 days ahead on average. OTA listings can drive bookings faster, sometimes within weeks, but only once your listing has enough reviews to look trustworthy.

Is Baidu SEO still worth the effort with AI search growing?

Yes, and it’s actually become more valuable, not less. Baidu’s own AI Overview pulls from indexed, well-structured Baidu content, so investing in Baidu SEO now also improves your odds of being cited by DeepSeek and Doubao when a traveler asks them a direct question about where to stay.

What budget should a boutique hotel plan for China marketing?

It depends on how competitive your destination is, but a realistic starting point for a single property is a Chinese website, a Ctrip and Fliggy listing, and two to three months of Xiaohongshu KOC seeding before adding paid Baidu SEM. Trying to do all channels at once with a small budget usually means doing all of them badly.

Our Services for Hotels and Tourism Professionals

We run Baidu SEO, OTA account management, and Xiaohongshu content programs specifically for hotels and resorts chasing Chinese travelers, currently across properties in Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. If you also work with group tourism, our sister site Chinese Tourists Agency covers the broader outbound tourism market in more depth. Contact us to talk through your current visibility on Ctrip, Meituan, and Xiaohongshu.