Why Chinese Travelers Are Chasing the Aurora, and How Nordic Hotels Are Catching That Demand

Last winter I got a call from a hotel manager in Tromsø. Small property, 40 rooms, glass roof suites. He asked me one question: “Pedro, why is my booking calendar full until March, but almost none of it is direct?” I already knew the answer before he finished the sentence. Xiaohongshu. Someone’s photo of the aurora over his hotel had gone around, and Chinese travelers were booking him through three different OTAs and two group tour operators, none of which he controlled.

That call is why I’m writing this article. Chinese demand for 极光游, aurora travel, and Nordic winter sports is not a small trend right now. It’s one of the fastest-growing outbound categories I’ve tracked in ten years, and most Western hotels and destinations have no idea how big the wave already is, or how to ride it instead of just watching it pass overhead.

The numbers behind the rush

I spent years at CITS building group tours to Europe, then years at Ctrip watching booking data move in real time. I have never seen a winter niche move this fast. A few data points worth your attention.

• Since Russia dropped its visa requirement for Chinese passport holders in December 2025, flight bookings to Russia jumped more than 60% year on year on Fliggy, mostly driven by aurora seekers heading to Murmansk. That is not a Nordic number, but it tells you the size of the appetite. Source: 订单涨60%，2026第一个爆火景点挤满中国人.
• On Xiaohongshu, the #极光# topic has passed 640 million views. The #俄罗斯旅游# topic alone sits above 820 million. Aurora content is one of the highest-performing travel categories on the platform right now, full stop.
• Norway and Finland cost two to three times what a Russia aurora trip costs, and Chinese travelers are still choosing them in growing numbers, because the infrastructure is better and the visa is simpler for many passport types.
• Tromsø, the unofficial aurora capital of Norway, has become a genuine case study in what happens when demand outpaces preparation. I’ll get to that.

Now let’s talk about what 极光游 actually means to a Chinese traveler, because it is not the same thing as “seeing the northern lights.”

极光游: what the term really carries

极光游 (jí guāng yóu) means “aurora travel” in the most literal sense. But on Chinese social media, it has grown into something closer to a full travel category, like 亲子游 (family travel) or 自驾游 (self-drive travel). It includes the aurora chase itself, but also the whole package around it: the glass-roof hotel, the dog sledding, the reindeer farm, the ice hotel bar, the thermal pool under the sky. When a Chinese traveler searches 极光游 on Xiaohongshu, they expect a full sensory itinerary, not just a night sky photo.

This matters for your marketing. If your hotel only talks about aurora viewing, you are competing on one feature. If you talk about the full 极光游 experience, meals, activities, the warm room after the cold night, you are competing on the category itself. Big difference in how a Chinese traveler decides.

Tromsø: the warning inside the success story

I want to be honest about Tromsø, because the story is not all good news, and there is a real lesson in the bad part.

Tromsø went from around 420,000 visitors in 2009 to about 820,000 by 2016, and Chinese travelers have kept growing as a share of that since. By this past February, the town recorded 137,000 visitors in a single month, against a local population of roughly 80,000. During peak weeks the visitor-to-resident ratio hit close to 3 to 1. Chinese social media reported that on Chinese New Year’s Eve this year, roughly 80% of the crowd on the town’s mountain lookout was Chinese.

Here is the part hotels need to hear. Local reporting, including a detailed piece from 澎湃新闻 (The Paper), found that close to half the tour operators working the aurora circuit in Tromsø are unlicensed, and most of them are run by Chinese operators who never coordinate with local hotels or the town at all. Xiaohongshu has hundreds of posts from Chinese travelers complaining about unlicensed guides who no-showed, overcharged, or got arrested mid-trip. One post I read from a traveler from Chengdu said the only sight she saw that day was the inside of a police station, because her driver got picked up. Source: 北极之都①｜挪威的挑战：亚洲游客的商机与冲突.

So the demand is real, but a lot of it is currently flowing through the wrong channel, gray-market operators, resellers, group tours with thin margins, instead of straight to the hotel. The hotels and destinations winning right now are the ones that got in front of Chinese travelers early, in their own words, on their own platform, before the resellers did.

What the smart Nordic properties are doing differently

I work with a handful of winter destinations now, and I see a pattern in the ones that are converting this demand into direct, profitable bookings instead of losing it to a tour wholesaler.

• They publish real success-rate information. Chinese travelers ask constantly: what are my actual odds of seeing the aurora on a 4-night stay? Properties that answer this honestly, with months, cloud cover data, and past guest photos, build trust fast.
• They open bookings early and say so loudly. 极光游 is planned 4 to 8 months ahead by a large share of travelers. If your booking page or your Xiaohongshu content is not live by June for a December trip, you are already behind.
• They price transparently in RMB terms or at least give a clear reference point. Chinese travelers comparing Norway against a much cheaper Russia trip need to understand exactly what they get for the extra money: real infrastructure, licensed guides, no risk of a police station detour.
• They work with a small number of trusted guides directly, and they say so on their own channels, which quietly signals “book with us, skip the gray market.”

None of this is complicated. But almost none of it happens without a deliberate plan for Chinese social media. And for aurora and winter sports travel specifically, that plan has to center on Xiaohongshu, not WeChat, not Douyin. Let me explain why and how.

How I would run the Xiaohongshu side of this

Xiaohongshu is where 极光游 gets planned, researched, and finally decided. It is a search engine as much as a social feed for this category. If I take on a Nordic hotel or destination client this month, here is roughly what I build.

1. Photo first, video to close

For aurora specifically, photos outperform video in the discovery phase. A single strong aurora photo, ideally with a person small in the frame for scale, gets saved and shared far more than a 30-second clip, because travelers use it as proof-of-possibility and as a screenshot to send to friends. Video works better later, for the account that has already earned a follow, showing the full night: waiting in the cold, the moment it appears, the walk back to a warm room. I tell clients: win the swipe with a photo, win the booking with a video.

2. Post on a planning calendar, not a random schedule

Because 极光游 is booked 4 to 8 months out, your content calendar has to run ahead of the season, not during it. I push clients to post their heaviest volume from May through August for a November-to-March aurora season. By the time it’s actually dark and cold in Norway, the traveler already booked, based on what she saw in July. Posting only in winter means you’re marketing to people who already made their decision.

3. KOC selection: outdoor and photography niches, not general travel accounts

I avoid big general travel influencers for this category. They cost more and their followers are not primed for a technical, gear-heavy trip. I look for mid-size KOC (key opinion consumers, meaning real travelers with a following, not celebrities) inside the outdoor photography niche: people who already post star trail shots, camera gear reviews, night photography tips. Their audience is exactly the traveler planning a serious aurora trip, and their recommendation carries more weight because they read as a peer, not an ad.

4. Answer the 听劝 posts directly, with real numbers

听劝 (tīng quàn) means roughly “open to advice.” It’s a huge post format on Xiaohongshu where a user asks the crowd a direct question before booking and wants honest answers, not just compliments. For aurora travel these posts are extremely common, and extremely specific. A destination or hotel that shows up in the comments with a real, useful answer earns more trust than ten polished ad posts.

Typical 听劝 questions I see on this topic:

• 什么时候去看极光成功率最高？(When is the highest success rate to see the aurora?)
• 去挪威看极光要穿什么？零下十几度扛得住吗？(What do I wear in Norway? Can I handle minus 10-something degrees?)
• 芬兰和挪威哪个看到极光的概率更高？(Finland or Norway, which has better odds?)

A hotel that has its social team, or an agency like ours, monitoring these threads and replying with specific, honest, non-salesy answers, current cloud forecasts, a real gear list, an honest comparison instead of just pushing their own location, builds an account that Chinese travelers trust before they ever land on the booking page.

一位用户在听劝帖下留言：”这个绝了，姐妹们冲！十一月中旬去的，三晚看到两次，冻得够呛但值了。”

Translation: “This is unreal, sisters, go for it! I went mid-November, saw it twice in three nights. Froze but it was worth it.”

That kind of comment, unpaid, specific, a little rough around the edges, converts better than any brand copy I could write. Part of our job is creating the conditions for real comments like this to happen and then making sure they surface on your account, not a competitor’s.

5. Optimize for RED search, not just the feed

A large and growing share of Xiaohongshu traffic now comes from users searching directly, the way they’d use Google. For 极光游 content, that means your notes need the right keywords in the title and the first two lines: 极光游, city names in Chinese (特罗姆瑟, 罗瓦涅米, 雷克雅未克), season months, and practical terms like 成功率 (success rate) and 穿搭 (what to wear). A beautifully shot note with a vague title will lose to a plainer note that actually matches what people type into the search bar. We build a keyword map before we write a single caption.

If you want the fuller playbook on how we structure a Little Red Book presence from account setup through paid boosting, we’ve laid it out here: Attracting Chinese Tourists Through Little Red Book.

What a hotel outside the Nordics can take from this

You don’t need an aurora to learn from this trend. What matters is the pattern underneath it.

Chinese travelers are chasing rare, photographable, hard-to-guarantee experiences right now, and they are willing to pay a premium and travel far for them, as long as someone answers their practical questions honestly before they book. That could be aurora, but it could also be a specific mountain sunrise, a rare bird migration, a hot spring in snow, a ski slope with a view nobody else has. If your property has one thing that is genuinely rare and photographs well, you have the raw material for the same strategy: early planning-calendar content, honest odds and logistics, KOC in the right niche, and a real human voice answering questions in the comments.

The mistake I see most often is a hotel waiting until the season starts to post anything, then wondering why all their bookings come through a tour wholesaler taking 30% off the top. By the time your season opens, the Chinese traveler already decided. The work happens six months earlier, quietly, in a search bar on Xiaohongshu.

If your winter property wants to actually own its share of this demand instead of watching it get resold three times before it reaches you, that’s exactly the kind of work we do for hotels and destinations. Have a look at our hotel marketing services, or if you’re a destination board rather than a single property, our destination marketing page covers how we approach it at that level.

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