Why the Philippines Is Winning More Chinese Tourists
In 2019, China was the Philippines’ second largest source of tourists. 1.7 million Chinese visitors landed that year. Then came the pandemic, then came a run of confrontations in the South China Sea between Philippine and Chinese vessels, and the number collapsed. By 2025, Chinese arrivals had fallen to roughly 262,000, about 15% of the 2019 level. I watched several hotel groups in the region quietly stop budgeting for the China market during those years. It wasn’t worth the marketing spend.
That is changing now, and fast. But “changing” and “back to normal” are not the same thing, and an operator who treats them as the same thing will waste money.
I run GMA, a marketing agency in Shanghai that has placed hotel and travel clients in front of Chinese travelers since 2012. We watched the Philippines drop off Chinese travel agents’ maps after 2016, and we’re now watching it fight its way back onto them.
What actually happened to the numbers
Here is the timeline, without the spin. Territorial disputes over Scarborough Shoal and the wider South China Sea turned into a steady stream of incidents from 2023 onward: water cannon confrontations, boat collisions, diplomatic protests. Chinese state media covered them heavily. Outbound travel agencies in China, who sell packages on margin and avoid anything politically sensitive, quietly stopped pushing the Philippines. Flight capacity between the two countries shrank to an estimated 45% of pre-pandemic levels. The result: arrivals from mainland China fell 17% in the first eleven months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, even as total foreign arrivals to the Philippines held up.
Then, on January 16, 2026, the Philippines opened a 14-day visa-free entry window for Chinese nationals, valid for an initial one-year trial and limited to arrivals through Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila and Mactan-Cebu International Airport. The Department of Foreign Affairs framed it plainly: facilitate trade, investment, tourism, and people-to-people exchange. Nobody pretended it wasn’t also a signal that Manila wanted the relationship to cool down on the tourism side even if the maritime dispute stayed unresolved.
The early numbers moved. Chinese arrivals in the first quarter of 2026 reached 114,377, up 56.5% from 73,064 in the same quarter of 2025. From January through April 2026, arrivals hit 150,708, against 93,186 a year earlier. That is real growth, not noise. It is also still a fraction of what the market used to deliver, and a fraction of what neighboring destinations pull in every single quarter.
The gap with the rest of Southeast Asia
Put the Philippine number next to its neighbors and the scale of the recovery looks smaller. Thailand alone received about 1.49 million Chinese visitors in the first quarter of 2026, roughly thirteen times the Philippine figure over the same three months, and stayed China’s top individual source market in Southeast Asia with 2.32 million Chinese arrivals across the first five months of the year. Malaysia and Vietnam both post Chinese arrival numbers in the hundreds of thousands per quarter as well. We wrote a longer breakdown of how Thailand keeps winning this market, and the short version is that Thailand never lost the trust of Chinese group tour operators the way the Philippines did.
So yes, the Philippines is winning back Chinese tourists. It is not winning the region. Not yet, and maybe not for a few more years.
Three things still holding the market back
The security image. On Xiaohongshu, where most Chinese travelers now do their trip research instead of asking a travel agent, the Philippines carries a split reputation. Some posts rank it as the second safest country in Southeast Asia after Singapore, ahead of Thailand. Others, often from creators chasing views with sensational thumbnails, push travelers toward remote islands with real safety issues and general warnings about Manila. Both types of content rank. A traveler doing five minutes of research before booking sees a mixed picture, and mixed pictures lose to countries with a cleaner one.
Air connectivity. New routes are landing this year: Air China now flies Chongqing to Manila four times a week, Xiamen Airlines restarted Hangzhou to Manila and added a Chongqing route, and Qingdao Airlines opened Changsha to Manila. That is real progress after years of near silence on the flight schedule. But it is still a handful of routes into two airports, against dozens of Chinese cities with direct flights to Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur. A family in Chengdu or Wuhan planning a beach week checks the direct flight option first. If there isn’t one, the Philippines drops off the shortlist before price or hotel even enter the conversation.
Payment and booking friction. Chinese leisure travelers now expect to pay the way they pay at home. If a resort’s front desk can’t take Alipay or WeChat Pay, or if the property has no presence on the Chinese platforms travelers actually use to plan a trip, it is invisible to a huge share of this market regardless of how good the beach is.
What still works in the Philippines’ favor
The fundamentals that made the Philippines attractive before 2016 haven’t gone anywhere. Filipinos speak English well, which lowers the friction Chinese travelers feel elsewhere. Many hospitality staff, especially in properties run by the country’s large ethnic Chinese business community, speak Mandarin. The archipelago holds over 7,000 islands, and destinations like Boracay, Cebu, Bohol, and the Banawe Rice Terraces still deliver the beach, dive, and culture mix Chinese leisure travelers rank highest when they choose a trip: 73% put a beach holiday at the top of their wish list, according to the China Tourism Academy, ahead of sightseeing, hot springs, and shopping. None of that changed while the numbers were down. It was simply unreachable.
- Boracay. White sand, a dense range of resorts across every budget, and enough water sports (diving, kite surfing, parasailing) to fill a week.
- Bohol and Cebu. Reef diving, the Chocolate Hills, and city infrastructure good enough for travelers who don’t want to rough it.
- Banawe Rice Terraces. Hand carved nearly 2,000 years ago into the Cordillera mountains, and one of the few Philippine sites that draws the culture-first segment of the Chinese outbound market, not just the beach crowd.
How one small hotel group got ahead of the recovery
Elke, a Belgian who runs a small chain of boutique hotels in the Philippines, called us in late 2025, before the visa-free announcement. Her three properties were running at healthy occupancy from Korean and domestic guests, but China was close to zero. Under 2% of bookings. She didn’t want to build a China strategy from nothing once the market reopened. She wanted to be ready when it did.
We started with the basics her competitors were skipping: a Xiaohongshu account with real photos of the rooms and the surrounding town, not stock imagery, and a payment setup that took Alipay at the front desk. Then we built relationships with two receptive tour operators in Guangzhou and Chengdu who package Philippine itineraries, since most of the volume in this market still moves through agencies rather than direct bookings, even among younger travelers. We didn’t touch pricing. We didn’t chase paid ads on Chinese platforms, which burn budget fast for a three-property brand with no name recognition.
By April 2026, three months after the visa-free window opened, Chinese guests made up 11% of bookings across her three properties, up from under 2%. The Xiaohongshu account wasn’t the driver on its own. It was the thing that made her hotels legible to the two receptive agencies once they went looking for partners to fill the sudden jump in demand. An agency won’t recommend a property it can’t show its clients want to see, in a format those clients trust.
What a hotel or tour operator should actually do
If you run a property or a tour business in the Philippines, the visa-free window is an opening, not a guarantee. Here’s what moves the needle, in order of effort.
Take Chinese payment methods. Alipay and WeChat Pay are not a nice-to-have anymore, they’re table stakes. A traveler who can’t pay the way they pay at home notices, and it colors the rest of the stay. We go into the setup and the actual cost to a property in our guide to offering WeChat Pay and Alipay.
Get found on Xiaohongshu before you spend on ads. Xiaohongshu has become the default search engine Chinese travelers use to research a trip, ahead of a general web search. That means unclaimed and thin brand presence there is a bigger problem than a weak Google listing. We cover how the platform’s search ranking actually works for brands that want to show up when someone types “菲律宾 度假酒店” into the search bar.
Work with receptive agencies, not against them. Most Chinese leisure travel to Southeast Asia still moves through packaged itineraries sold by agencies in mainland China, even post-pandemic. A property that only chases direct bookings is fighting for the smaller half of the market. Our guide to working with Chinese tour operators covers how these relationships get built and what agencies actually look for before they’ll add a new property to a package.
Don’t ignore the front desk basics. A Mandarin-speaking staff member, or at minimum a translated welcome guide and menu, closes a surprising share of the gap between a Chinese guest’s first stay and their second. Word travels fast in group chats when a hotel gets this right, and just as fast when it doesn’t. For a fuller checklist, we wrote up how hotels position themselves to Chinese tourists in more detail.
FAQ
Is the Philippines’ visa-free policy for Chinese tourists permanent?
No. It launched January 16, 2026 as a one-year trial, limited to stays of up to 14 days entering through Manila or Cebu. It is not extendable and can’t be converted into another visa type. Whether it becomes permanent depends on how the trial year goes, and on the state of the broader relationship between the two countries. Operators should plan around it without assuming it’s locked in for the next five years.
Should a small hotel bother with the China market if Thailand and Vietnam capture so much more volume?
Yes, but with realistic expectations. You are not competing for the mass group-tour traveler who defaults to Thailand. You’re competing for the smaller segment specifically looking for an island experience without the crowds, and for repeat Southeast Asia travelers who’ve already done Phuket and Da Nang. That’s a real, addressable audience. It’s just not the whole outbound Chinese market, and treating it that way sets you up for disappointment.
What’s the fastest way to test whether Chinese demand exists for my property?
Open a Xiaohongshu account, post real photos and a short property description in Chinese, and track saves and comments over four to six weeks before spending a dollar on ads. Saves are the strongest early signal of purchase intent on the platform. If nothing moves after six weeks with consistent posting, that tells you something too, and it’s cheaper to learn it there than after signing a contract with a tour operator.
GMA works with hospitality and tourism operators across Southeast Asia who are rebuilding their China strategy from scratch, not patching an old one. We handle the Xiaohongshu presence, the payment setup, and the introductions to receptive agencies that actually sell your destination. If your China bookings dropped to near zero over the past few years and you want a plan before the next visa-policy headline changes the picture again, get in touch with our team.
