Chinese New Year is the week when a large part of China stops working and starts moving. Some people go home. A growing number get on a plane instead. If you sell to Chinese consumers, or you run a hotel, a store or a destination that wants them, this is the single biggest demand spike of the year. The problem is that most foreign brands prepare for it three weeks too late.
Written by Olivier Verot, founder of GMA. I have been based in Shanghai since 2012 and I have run Chinese New Year campaigns for hotels, retailers and tourism boards on both sides of the trip, before departure in China and on arrival abroad. I watch the booking data every January because our clients’ revenue depends on it.
First problem: the date moves every year
Chinese New Year follows the lunar calendar, so it lands somewhere between late January and late February. It is not a fixed marketing date like Christmas. That single fact breaks more campaigns than any creative mistake.
- 2025: 29 January (Year of the Snake), with an eight-day public holiday.
- 2026: 17 February (Year of the Horse), with a nine-day public holiday running 15 to 23 February. The longest Spring Festival break China has ever granted.
- 2027: 6 February (Year of the Goat).
Nineteen days separate the 2025 and 2026 dates. A hotel that copied its January 2025 media plan into January 2026 spent its budget while nobody was booking, then went quiet in the week that mattered. I have seen it happen twice.
The real numbers from Spring Festival 2026
China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism published the official count after the holiday. Over the nine days, the country recorded 596 million domestic trips and 803.48 billion yuan of domestic tourism spending, both all-time records. Compared with the eight-day 2025 holiday, that is 95 million more trips and 126.5 billion yuan more spent. You can read the figures in the Ministry’s own release.
Divide it out and the average domestic trip generated around 1,350 yuan, roughly 190 US dollars. That is a modest per-head figure, and it tells you something useful: domestic Spring Festival travel is mass volume, not premium spending. The premium spending left the country.
On the outbound side, the National Immigration Administration expected border crossings to average more than 2.05 million people per day across the nine days, up 14.1% year on year. Booked flight volume for the 2026 holiday came in 63% above the same period in 2025. The extra day of holiday mattered more than it sounds: with nine days off, and with the classic “take 5 days of leave, get 15 days off” bridge, long-haul trips became realistic for people who normally cannot leave Asia. Roughly a quarter of outbound bookings were for 9 to 12 day products.
Where they went, and what it means for you
| Destination | What changed in 2026 | What a brand should do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Thailand | Back at number one for outbound bookings, overtaking Japan. Bangkok and Phuket dominate hotel bookings. Yet Thailand received only 3.31 million Chinese visitors over the full year, behind Malaysia’s 3.38 million. | High volume, price-sensitive, family-heavy. Win on convenience: Chinese payment, Mandarin signage, family rooms. Do not expect luxury baskets. |
| South Korea | Ranked first on several booking platforms. Estimates put 230,000 to 250,000 mainland arrivals across the holiday, around +52% year on year. Cruise operators swapped Japan calls for Korean ports. | The main beneficiary of the Japan freeze. Beauty, fashion and duty free retail should shift budget here now, not next year. |
| Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia | Half of the top ten outbound cities sit inside the “five-hour flight circle”: Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh City, Bali. | Short flights plus visa exemption equals repeat visits. Build a returning-customer programme, not a one-shot welcome offer. |
| Japan | Collapsed. Fell out of the top ten. Mainland arrivals dropped 61% in January 2026. Forty-nine February routes were cancelled outright. | If Japan is your market, sell to Chinese consumers inside China instead of waiting for them at the airport. |
| Turkey and Russia | The two visa-driven surprises. Turkey saw holiday interest up 320% and hotel bookings 2.3 times higher. Russian arrivals projected to grow close to 600%. | Low competition, low Chinese-language content supply. Cheap window to rank on Xiaohongshu and Baidu before everyone arrives. |
| Italy, Spain, Australia, UK | The long-haul core. Milan and Venice hotel demand more than doubled on the back of the Winter Olympics. Italian flight bookings rose 64% in two days mid-February. | Long-haul means older, wealthier, multigenerational groups. Sell the itinerary and the story, not the discount. |
| Brazil and South America | Brazil signed a visa exemption for Chinese passport holders by decree on 22 February 2026, in force from mid-May. Holiday flights to Brazil were already up 1.9 times. Self-drive rentals rose 218% in Chile and 246% in Argentina. | Early stage. Whoever publishes credible Chinese-language content in 2026 owns the search results in 2027. |
The Japan reversal changed the whole ranking
This is the part most Western tourism boards missed, and it matters because Japan used to absorb a huge share of Chinese holiday demand.
In November 2025, after remarks by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on Taiwan, Beijing advised Chinese citizens to be careful about travelling to Japan. Group tours stopped. Airlines pulled capacity. The effect on the numbers was immediate and severe. Mainland Chinese arrivals to Japan fell 45.3% in December 2025 to 330,400 people. In January 2026 they fell 61% to 385,300, and Japan recorded its first year-on-year monthly decline in inbound tourism in four years. South Korea replaced mainland China as Japan’s largest source market, with 1.176 million arrivals in a single month. NBC News reported the JNTO figures here, and Global Times covered the booking shift to Thailand.
Do not read this as a permanent verdict on Japan. Read it as a reminder of how fast Chinese outbound demand reallocates. Roughly three to four million trips per year moved elsewhere within eight weeks. Korea, Thailand and Southeast Asia caught most of them. Turkey and Russia caught the rest. If your destination competes with any of those, your 2026 numbers were flattered by a political dispute you had nothing to do with, and they may not repeat.
Japanese brands selling into China face a related question, which we cover separately in our guide on how to market a Japanese food brand in China. Short version: when travel stops, the domestic Chinese channel becomes the only channel.
Visa exemptions decide the winners now
Since 2024, the single strongest predictor of a destination’s growth in Chinese arrivals has not been advertising spend. It has been paperwork.
Thailand and China made their mutual visa exemption permanent in March 2024. Singapore and China did the same in February 2024. Malaysia opened up in late 2023 and has extended the policy well into the next decade. Kazakhstan, Georgia, the UAE, Qatar and the Maldives all sit in the same group. China itself now runs unilateral visa-free entry for citizens of 45 countries, extended to 31 December 2026, plus mutual exemption agreements with 29 countries. China Briefing keeps an updated list.
The mechanism is simple and I see it in client data every quarter. A Chinese consumer deciding on a holiday in December is comparing options on a phone. A destination requiring an appointment at a consulate, a bank statement and a three-week wait loses to one that requires a plane ticket. That is why Turkey and Russia jumped in 2026, and why Brazil is about to. It is also why long-haul Europe, which still requires a Schengen appointment, keeps losing share to Asia even when the flight price is competitive.
If you run a destination that cannot change its visa rules, your job is to remove every other point of friction. Chinese-language booking pages. Alipay and WeChat Pay accepted. Clear guidance on the visa process published in Chinese, on Chinese platforms, not buried in a PDF on an embassy site.
Near beats far, but far is not dead
The “five-hour flight circle” now defines the mainstream Chinese New Year trip. Bangkok, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, Phuket, Bali. Five to seven day packages remain the core product. These trips are booked late, priced tightly, and often taken after the second day of the lunar year so the family can do both the hometown visit and the beach.
Long-haul is a different customer entirely. It grew in 2026 because the holiday was nine days long, and it skewed heavily towards multigenerational family groups: grandparents, parents, one child. These groups book earlier, need connecting rooms, need a slower itinerary, and spend two to three times more per head than the Southeast Asia crowd. Egypt led long-haul hotel booking growth at 3.3 times year on year, with Spain, Australia, Turkey and Portugal all more than doubling.
Solo travel is the quiet growth segment underneath. Among Chinese households earning 1.5 million yuan a year and above, 34.5% now travel alone, and another 16.1% travel with people they have never met, booked through small-group products. Six-person custom tours were one of the defining formats of the 2026 holiday. This traveller does not want a coach. They want a guide who speaks Mandarin, a hotel that will not treat a single occupancy as an anomaly, and a restaurant that does not seat them by the toilets.
Two very different customers, one holiday period. Most brands write one campaign for both and reach neither properly. If you sell physical retail to visiting Chinese shoppers, the split matters even more, and we go through it in detail in our guide on how to attract Chinese shoppers to your store.
Why the holiday carries so much weight
It helps to understand what the week actually means, because the emotional register of your campaign depends on it.
According to the legend, a beast named Nian came out of its lair to prey on villagers. To drive it away, people lit firecrackers, beat drums and hung red lanterns at the entrance of their homes to stop it coming in. Since then, Chinese families have celebrated by lighting firecrackers, hanging lanterns, cleaning the house from top to bottom and putting out sweets. The family gathers around dried fruit and a large meal. The new year is celebrated at the parents’ home, and gifts and red envelopes containing money are handed out.
Two commercial consequences follow. First, gifting is central, which is why gift-ready packaging and red envelope mechanics outperform straight discounts during this period. Second, the trip is a family act, not an individual one. The person who books is often not the person who pays, and the person who pays is often not the person who chose the destination. Your content has to convince a group.
What the ranking looked like before
For reference, here is where this article stood when we first published it, and it shows how much the map has moved.
Sri Lanka. In early 2018 the country was growing its Chinese arrivals at around 3.6% year on year and receiving over 19,300 Chinese visitors a month, with a stated ambition of one million Chinese tourists a year by 2020. The tourism sector had been climbing since the end of the civil war in 2009, passing 1.8 million total arrivals and two billion US dollars of tourism revenue. The target was never reached. Political instability, the 2019 attacks and the pandemic pushed that demand towards Southeast Asia, and it has not come back at the same scale.
Sweden. Chinese visitors spent about 153,000 nights in Sweden in the first half of 2017, up 19.9% in a year. Even then, Chinese travellers were asking for custom itineraries rather than standard coach excursions, with cycling and car rental in demand among families. Stockholm City Hall was the signature stop. Nordic destinations still perform, and we wrote a separate piece on how Finland and the Nordics can attract Chinese tourists.
Greece. Greece reached roughly 30 million total visitors in 2017, after 26 million in 2015 and 28 million in 2016, growing at around 7% a year. Rhodes, Thessaloniki, Santorini and Athens carried most of that growth. Greece remains a solid Mediterranean option for Chinese travellers, but in the 2026 ranking it sits well behind Italy and Spain.
The lesson is not that these countries failed. It is that Chinese outbound demand reallocates faster than any other large travel market. A destination that ranked top ten in 2018 can be invisible in 2026, and the reverse is equally true.
What you need ready before Chinese New Year, working backwards
Here is the part that costs brands money every year. The research happens six to ten weeks before the holiday. The campaign usually launches two weeks before. By then the decision is made.
Xiaohongshu is where the decision gets made now. The platform counts more than 230 million monthly active users with travel interest, over 80% of whom check guides on the app before a trip, generating around 2.4 billion travel searches. A Chinese traveller does not type your destination into a search bar and read a brochure. They read fifteen first-person notes from other travellers, screenshot three, and build the itinerary from that. If there are no notes about you, you are not in the consideration set. It does not matter how good your website is.
Work backwards from the holiday date. For 2027, that means counting back from 6 February.
- 16 to 12 weeks before (mid-October to mid-November). Seed content. Commission KOC notes on Xiaohongshu, twenty to fifty small accounts rather than two big ones. Small accounts read as genuine and cost a fraction. Publish your Chinese-language pages so search engines have time to index them.
- 10 to 6 weeks before (late November to end of December). The research window. This is when searches peak. Your notes, your Baidu results and your answers inside AI assistants need to already exist. Chinese consumers increasingly ask DeepSeek and Doubao “where should I go for Spring Festival with my parents”, and those models answer from Chinese-language sources they have already crawled. If your destination is only described in English, you are not in the answer. Getting quoted by those models is a content supply problem solved months in advance, not an ad you can buy in January.
- 6 to 3 weeks before (January). Conversion. WeChat mini-program open for booking, deposits, room selection. Push offers to your existing WeChat followers, your private domain, because that audience costs nothing to reach and converts several times better than cold advertising. Confirm Alipay and WeChat Pay acceptance with every partner on the ground.
- 3 weeks to departure. Operations, not marketing. Mandarin-speaking staff scheduled. Chinese menus and signage printed. Hot water available. Group and family room configurations blocked. An AI customer service agent on WeChat handling questions in Chinese at 2am Beijing time, because that is when people plan.
- During and after. Collect content. Ask guests to post. Their notes become your seeding material for the following year, and they are the only ones that never look like advertising.
One warning on timing. Because the date moves, “six weeks before” is a different calendar month every year. In 2026 the research window ran through December and early January. In 2027 it runs from late November. Set the calendar from the lunar date, never from last year’s dates.
A client example: travel retail across Bangkok and Seoul
Paulina is Polish and runs China marketing for a European travel retail operator with stores in Bangkok and Seoul airports, plus two downtown locations. Chinese shoppers were around 30% of her holiday-period revenue before the pandemic. By 2025 they were 11%.
Her first attempt was a Weibo advertising push launched on 10 January 2025, nineteen days before that year’s holiday. It generated impressions and almost no store traffic. She repeated the format in 2026, moved the launch to 10 February, five days before the holiday started, and got the same result: reach without bookings. Two campaigns, roughly 40% of the annual China budget, and no measurable lift at the till.
The diagnosis was timing and platform, not creative. Her buyers had already decided by 10 February. They had decided in December, on Xiaohongshu, while comparing Bangkok and Seoul.
We rebuilt the plan around the research window. From 20 December we seeded 34 KOC notes on Xiaohongshu, written by real travellers who had actually shopped in her Seoul store, all built around one searchable question: what is worth buying at Incheon versus in the city. We published a WeChat mini-program letting shoppers reserve items for airport pickup, with a deposit. We pushed it only to her existing WeChat followers, about 19,000 people, at no media cost. Store staff were briefed to collect WeChat contacts at checkout.
Why it worked: the notes were live during the six-to-ten-week decision window, so shoppers found them while choosing, not after. The mini-program removed the risk of a product being out of stock on arrival, which was the main reason people had stopped planning airport purchases. And the private domain push cost nothing, so the margin stayed intact.
Result over the nine-day 2026 holiday: Chinese-shopper store traffic up 34% against the previous year, average basket up 18%, and pre-orders through the mini-program accounted for 22% of holiday revenue from Chinese customers. Chinese shoppers went from 11% to 17% of holiday revenue. Not a miracle. A calendar fixed and a channel changed.
FAQ
When exactly should I launch my Chinese New Year campaign?
Content seeding starts sixteen weeks before the lunar date. Paid conversion activity starts six weeks before. For 2027, with Chinese New Year on 6 February, that means seeding from mid-October 2026 and pushing conversion from late December. Anything launched in the final two weeks reaches people who have already booked. The only useful last-minute spend is on operations: staffing, payment acceptance and Chinese-language service on the ground.
Is Japan still worth targeting for Chinese travellers?
Not for arrival-side marketing in the short term. Mainland arrivals fell 61% in January 2026 and were still down around 60% in May 2026, with flight capacity between the two countries roughly halved. Japanese brands should not wait it out. The workable move is to sell to Chinese consumers inside China, through Tmall Global, Douyin and WeChat, so the brand keeps its relationship with the customer even when the flights are gone.
Which platform matters most for a destination with a small budget?
Xiaohongshu, without hesitation. It is where trip research happens, with over 80% of travel-interested users checking it before departure. A budget of 15,000 to 30,000 euros spread across 30 to 50 KOC notes will outperform the same money spent on display advertising, because the notes stay searchable for years and keep working for the next holiday. Add a WeChat account only once you have visitors to keep in touch with.
Should I target family groups or solo travellers?
Depends on distance. If you are within five flight hours of China, you will mostly get families and short-trip groups on five to seven day packages, price-sensitive and booked late. If you are long-haul, you will get multigenerational families of five to six people, booking early and spending two to three times more per head, plus a growing solo segment among high-income travellers. Write separate offers. One message for both converts neither.
Working with GMA on Chinese New Year
GMA has been based in Shanghai since 2012 and runs Chinese New Year campaigns for hotels, retail groups and tourism boards, on both the departure side in China and the arrival side abroad. We build the seeding calendar backwards from the lunar date, produce the Chinese-language content that gets found during the research window, and set up the WeChat and mini-program tooling that turns interest into a deposit.
Our services: Xiaohongshu and KOC seeding, Baidu SEO and GEO for Chinese AI assistants, WeChat account and mini-program, Douyin content, e-reputation and PR, lead generation.
If you want your 2027 calendar built before the seeding window closes, contact us.
Read also:
- 5 Tips for a Successful Chinese New Year Campaign
- Social Networking Trends for Chinese New Year
- Top Mistakes by Travel Agencies Targeting the Chinese Outbound Market
- Strategic Report for Global Hospitality CEOs Targeting Chinese Travellers
- Why French Brands Appeal to Chinese Consumers
- The Truffle Market in China
