More Chinese people are traveling overseas again, and they book differently than they did five years ago. China is back on top as the world’s largest outbound travel market. The China Tourism Academy expects Chinese outbound trips to reach around 175 million in 2026, more than double the 2024 level, and travelers aged 25 to 39 now make up 54% of those trips. These are young, independent, mobile-first travelers. They skip the package tour, build their own itinerary, and decide where to go based on what they see on their phone.
That last point is where most foreign destinations and hotels get it wrong. They still ask about the platforms that mattered in 2018. The map has moved. This guide shows where Chinese travelers actually plan and book trips in 2026, and where a tourism brand should put its money today.
Written by Olivier Verot, founder of GMA. I have run tourism marketing campaigns in China since 2012, from national tourism boards to boutique hotel groups, and I watch these platforms shift traffic every quarter.
The 2026 map: who plans, who discovers, who books
For years, the standard advice was simple: get on Mafengwo and Qyer, publish long travel guides, done. That advice is now out of date. Both platforms have declined. The travel planning behavior moved to Xiaohongshu for search, to Douyin for discovery, and to Ctrip for booking. If you copy an old checklist, you spend budget where the audience no longer is.
Here is how the four platforms that matter actually split the job in 2026.
| Platform | Main role in 2026 | Scale | Best use for a tourism brand |
|---|---|---|---|
| Xiaohongshu (RED) | Travel search engine and trust layer | 2.3 billion+ travel-interest users, 24 billion+ travel searches | Rank in search, seed KOC notes, answer real questions |
| Douyin | Destination discovery, spontaneous travel | Searches for niche destinations up 200% year on year | Short video that makes a place go viral, then convert in-app |
| Ctrip / Trip.com | Booking and transaction | China’s dominant OTA for flights, hotels, tickets | Flagship store, inventory, reviews, paid placement |
| Mafengwo / Qyer | Legacy reference, shrinking audience | Declining engagement, UGC model under pressure | Low priority, keep a basic listing at most |
Xiaohongshu: the real travel search engine
If you remember one thing from this article, remember this. Young Chinese travelers no longer open a travel app to plan. They open Xiaohongshu and type a query, the same way a Western tourist opens Google. According to 环球旅讯 (TravelDaily), Xiaohongshu counts more than 2.3 billion travel-interest users, over 24 billion travel searches, and more than 390,000 professional tourism accounts publishing over 21 million travel notes a month. More than 80% of users search travel guides directly on the platform.
The mechanism matters more than the numbers. A traveler searches “Barcelona 3 days” or “Kyoto with kids”, reads five or six notes from other real users, saves the ones that look honest, and builds a shortlist. Your destination either appears in those results or it does not exist for that person. This is search, not advertising. So the work is closer to SEO than to a media buy: you need many notes, from many accounts, covering the exact questions people type, with real photos and a clear structure.
The most effective lever here is KOC, key opinion consumers. Small accounts with a few thousand followers, high trust, real trips. You seed dozens of them around one destination or one hotel. That volume of authentic notes is what pushes you up the search results and into the “you might also like” feed. A single big influencer post looks like an ad and gets scrolled past. Fifty honest notes look like consensus.
Douyin: where destinations go viral
Xiaohongshu captures the traveler who is already planning. Douyin creates the desire before any plan exists. This is the discovery engine. According to Douyin’s 2026 cultural tourism trend report, searches for niche destinations jumped 200% year on year, and a single phone video can turn an unknown town into a must-visit spot in a week.
The platform changed travel decision-making itself. The old pattern was plan far ahead, book carefully. The new pattern Douyin describes is “see it, want it, go”. Users watch a clip, feel the pull, and act fast, sometimes booking the same week. Douyin now runs a full loop inside the app: content that seeds the desire, an order button, the trip itself, then the traveler posts their own video and feeds the next person. For a foreign destination, the play is short vertical video with a strong first two seconds, a local hook, and a booking path that does not make the viewer leave the app.
Ctrip / Trip.com: still the booking giant
Discovery and trust do not put money in your account. Booking does, and in China that still means Ctrip, known abroad as Trip.com. It remains the dominant online travel agency for flights, hotels, attraction tickets and visa services. Once a traveler has decided on your destination through Xiaohongshu and Douyin, most of them complete the transaction on Ctrip.
The mistake I see is treating Ctrip as a passive listing. It is a sales channel you manage. A flagship store, correct and complete inventory, honest reviews you actually reply to, and paid placement during holiday peaks like Spring Festival, May Day and National Day. A destination that trends on social but has weak Ctrip inventory loses the sale at the last step. The three platforms are one funnel, not three separate campaigns.
What happened to Mafengwo and Qyer
Mafengwo was once called the travel bible of the young generation. It built its name on detailed user-written travel guides, reviews, tips, hotel and destination information, plus an in-app shop and a booking function covering tens of thousands of destinations. That heritage is real, and the brand still exists. In April 2026 it launched an AI travel assistant called AI小蚂 for real-time questions and itinerary planning, and it still publishes trend reports. But the audience has thinned. The user-generated content model that made it famous is exactly what now struggles against short video, and its planning traffic has largely moved to Xiaohongshu and Douyin.
Qyer followed a similar path. Founded in 2004 by overseas Chinese sharing tips on traveling around Europe, it grew into a one-stop outbound travel platform with a community, a trip planning tool and an e-commerce arm, and it reached around 100 million registered users. Outbound travel was its whole reason to exist, so the pandemic hit it hard, and it pivoted toward domestic tourism to survive. Chinese business media now describe Qyer as largely forgotten, quiet even on its own Xiaohongshu account, its UGC advantage turned into its weak point. The old saying “Mafengwo for inbound, Qyer for outbound” no longer describes where travelers actually are.
So should you ignore them completely? Not quite. A basic, accurate listing costs little and still catches the occasional researcher. But if you are deciding where the budget goes, these two are no longer the answer. Put the money where the searches happen.
How to market your tourism services on these platforms
1. Content built for search, not for brochures
First, accept why people are on these platforms. They come to plan a trip by reading about places and other people’s real experiences. So publish official content that answers the exact questions travelers type: pricing, what to see, how many days, best season, how to get there. Add a booking path so that when a user is ready, they can act instantly.
Beyond your own posts, produce many notes and short videos that give real, useful detail. On Xiaohongshu, structure and honesty rank. On Douyin, the first two seconds decide everything. The knowledge you publish shapes where users decide to travel and what they do once there. Put your destination inside their itinerary and you earn a place in the trip itself.
2. KOC and micro-influencers over big names
You cannot underestimate the influence of creators on these platforms, but the model has flipped. In 2018 brands chased one famous KOL. In 2026 the smarter play is volume of small, credible voices. Give KOCs a real experience, your hotel, your tour, your city, and let them post honest reviews with real photos and video.
The reason is trust. The whole value of Xiaohongshu is that it feels authentic. A single giant influencer reads as an ad. Nobody said you must pick one. Many micro-influencers promoting the same destination often beat one big campaign, because to a searching user, many independent notes look like consensus, not marketing. This is also what feeds the platform’s search and recommendation engine.
3. Manage your e-reputation, and now your AI reputation
Open information on social platforms and forums makes reputation management a survival issue for tourism. Travelers may already be complaining about your hotel or tour on these platforms, and those posts shape the decisions of thousands of others. Keep watch on how people talk about your brand. Reply to positive reviews, and answer bad experiences with a real explanation and a fix. For tourism this is dead-or-alive, because a trip is booked once and remembered for years.
There is a new layer in 2026. Chinese travelers increasingly ask AI assistants like DeepSeek and Doubao to plan trips and recommend destinations. These models pull from the Chinese web, from Xiaohongshu notes, from reviews. If your destination is described well and often across those sources, the AI recommends you. If not, it skips you. This is GEO, generative engine optimization, and for tourism it is becoming as important as ranking in classic search. The work is the same root cause: enough good, consistent content in Chinese, in the right places.
Case study: Marta, a Spanish tourism marketer
Marta runs marketing for a mid-size hotel group on Spain’s Mediterranean coast. She came to us in early 2025 with a clear problem. Chinese arrivals to her properties had recovered to only about 60% of their 2019 level, while other nationalities were back to full. Her agency had spent two years feeding a Mafengwo account and a stack of long travel guides. Bookings from that channel were close to flat, under 20 direct reservations in a year.
The reason was simple once we looked. Her audience, young independent travelers from Shanghai and Shenzhen, was not planning on Mafengwo anymore. They were searching “Costa Brava hotel” on Xiaohongshu and finding nothing from her group. We rebuilt the plan around where they actually were. We seeded 40 KOC notes over three months, each answering a specific search query, with real photos of the rooms and the coastline. We produced eight short Douyin videos on the destination, not the hotel, to create desire first. Then we fixed the last step: a proper Ctrip flagship store with correct inventory and fast review replies.
The Xiaohongshu notes did the heavy lifting, because they matched what people typed. Within seven months, Chinese direct bookings roughly tripled off that low base, and, more useful long term, her group started appearing when travelers searched the destination by name. No magic multiplier, just budget moved to where the searches happen.
Read also: Marketing to Chinese tourists and travelers
For the wider market picture, our sister agency covers it in detail here: why China remains the world’s number one outbound tourism market in 2026. Useful before you set a budget.
FAQ
Is Mafengwo still worth using in 2026?
As a primary channel, no. Mafengwo still exists and even added an AI trip assistant in 2026, but its planning audience has moved to Xiaohongshu and Douyin. If you have spare capacity, a clean, accurate listing does no harm and catches the occasional deep researcher. But do not build your Chinese tourism strategy on it, and do not let an agency bill you as if it were 2018. Put the core budget where travelers actually search today.
Which single platform should a foreign destination start with?
Xiaohongshu, without much doubt. It is where young Chinese travelers run their trip searches, with over 24 billion travel searches and more than 80% of users looking up guides there. Start by seeding KOC notes that answer the exact queries people type about your destination. Once that base exists, add Douyin for discovery and Ctrip for booking. Trying to do all three at once with a small budget usually means doing none of them well.
How does Douyin differ from Xiaohongshu for tourism?
Douyin creates desire, Xiaohongshu confirms the decision. On Douyin a traveler discovers a place they were not looking for, often leading to spontaneous, near-term trips, and niche destination searches there rose 200% year on year. On Xiaohongshu the same traveler then searches your destination by name and reads honest notes before committing. You want both: video to pull people in, notes to close the trust gap, then Ctrip to take the booking.
What is GEO and does tourism really need it?
GEO means optimizing so AI assistants recommend you. More Chinese travelers now ask DeepSeek or Doubao to plan itineraries, and these tools pull from Xiaohongshu notes, reviews and the Chinese web. If your destination is described well and often across those sources, the AI suggests it. If your content is thin, it is invisible. For tourism this already matters, and the fix overlaps with search work: enough consistent, high quality Chinese content in the right places.
Work with a team that runs these platforms daily
GMA is a digital marketing agency based in Shanghai, working in China since 2012. We build Chinese tourism campaigns across Xiaohongshu search, Douyin discovery and Ctrip booking, plus reputation and GEO. We adapt to any budget and can start from zero. Contact us for a tailored plan and a results estimate. See also our guides on attracting affluent Chinese tourists and reaching new traveler segments on Chinese short-video platforms.
Sources: 环球旅讯 (TravelDaily), Xiaohongshu 2026 cultural tourism data; 新浪财经, Douyin 2026 cultural tourism trend report; 虎嗅网, on Qyer’s decline.
