Why Chinese Travelers Are Booking ‘Interest Classes,’ Not Just Tours, in 2026

Last month a colleague in Shanghai sent me a screenshot from Xiaohongshu. A 24-year-old traveler had just spent two hours in a workshop in Yunnan learning to make handmade paper, then posted twelve photos of the process with the caption “I didn’t visit a place, I learned a skill.” The post had 40,000 likes in three days.

That post is not an outlier. It is a pattern. And if you run a winery, a distillery, a craft workshop, or any tourism business in the West that still sells “come look at what we do,” this pattern is about to change how you sell to Chinese travelers.

The trend: 旅游兴趣班, or travel interest classes

On Xiaohongshu right now, Chinese travelers are booking short, hands-on workshops at their destination instead of, or alongside, regular sightseeing. The Chinese term is 旅游兴趣班 (lǚyóu xìngqù bān), literally “travel interest class.” A traveler goes to Jingdezhen and throws a pot on a wheel. A traveler goes to Enshi and carves a Nuo opera mask. A traveler goes to Yunnan and hand-presses a sheet of traditional paper. The tie-dye stations, the silver jewelry benches, the sword practice sessions, all of it fits the same shape: short duration, high interaction, low barrier to entry, and one real piece of local culture baked in. You do not need to be an artist. You need two hours and curiosity.

The hashtag #跟着兴趣去旅行, “travel by following your interest,” has racked up 1.7 billion views on the platform. That is not a niche corner of Xiaohongshu. That is a mainstream travel behavior now.

Xiaohongshu made this official on April 23, 2026, at its travel summit in Tongxiang, Zhejiang. The platform stated outright that “interest has become the first entry point for travel decisions,” 兴趣成为旅行决策第一入口. That is a big claim for a platform to make in public, and the numbers behind it back it up: over 2.3 billion monthly interactions tied to travel-interest content, and daily usage time up 10% year over year among travel-focused users. A China Daily piece on the summit lays out the five interest categories the platform is now organizing content around: social experience, skill-building, cultural heritage, natural settings, and lifestyle activities. Read the China Daily summary of the 2026 Xiaohongshu travel summit for the full breakdown.

A NetEase feature on the same trend, written by a tourism researcher, put it simply: travelers want to “游中轻悟、闲中成长”, gain a little insight while traveling, grow a little while relaxing. Not a lecture. Not a museum plaque. A skill they take home in their hands.

I have spent ten years watching what makes a Chinese traveler stop scrolling and start planning. This is one of the clearest signals I have seen in years. A generic tour is content nobody reposts. A two-hour class where you make something and post the result is content everybody reposts.

The distillery that almost closed its tasting room

Let me tell you about a client. I will call him Duncan, because that is close enough to who he is. Small whisky distillery, Scottish Highlands, family-run since his grandfather’s time. Forty-five minutes north of the nearest town most Chinese tour buses actually stop at.

For years his Chinese visitor numbers looked fine on paper. Tour groups would stop for 40 minutes, get the standard walk-through, taste two drams, buy maybe one bottle per busload. One bottle. Per busload. Duncan did the math on that once and stopped doing it again, because it depressed him.

Here is the thing nobody told him: a standard distillery tour is not an experience. It is a queue with narration. Nobody in Shanghai brags to their friends about a queue.

What changed it was almost embarrassingly small. We took the exact same tour, cut it down, and turned the last 20 minutes into something new: a “build your own blend” station. Visitors sample four single casks, mix their own blend in a small bottle, cork it, and write their name on a handwritten label. Ninety minutes total, small groups only, six people max at a time.

Then we rebuilt the Xiaohongshu content around it. Not “visit our historic distillery.” Instead: “I blended my own whisky in the Highlands and it has my name on it.” Posts showed hands pouring, the cork going in, the label being written, close-ups of the finished bottle next to a window with heather outside. That is content someone reposts, because it is proof of something they did, not a photo of something they saw.

Six months later: the blending session was booking out two weeks in advance during peak season, per-visitor spend was up close to three times what it was on the old tour, and bottle purchases per group had gone from one to an average of four. Not because Duncan’s whisky got better. Because he stopped selling a viewing and started selling a story his visitors could tell about themselves.

That is the whole lesson, honestly. Nobody wants to watch you work. They want to leave with proof they tried.

How we turn a classic tour into a bookable interest class

This is not a rebrand. It is a redesign of the offer itself, and then a rebuild of the content that sells it. Here is roughly how we approach it with a new client.

Step one, find the two-hour version. Almost every tourism business already has a “making” moment buried inside a longer, passive tour: the moment where wine gets blended, cheese gets shaped, glass gets blown, wood gets carved. We isolate that moment, shorten the surrounding fluff, and build a standalone session around it. Short duration. High interaction. Low barrier. One piece of real local or artisanal knowledge included. That is the format Xiaohongshu travelers are already searching for.

Step two, give visitors something physical to take home. A bottle, a small ceramic piece, a printed photo, a dyed scarf. The takeaway object is what turns into content after the visitor leaves. Without it, there is nothing to post.

Step three, build the 种草 content before the booking page. 种草 (zhòng cǎo) means “planting the grass,” and it is the term Chinese marketers use for content that plants a want in someone’s mind before they have consciously decided to buy anything. On Xiaohongshu, that means first-person notes and short videos: hands doing the work, the specific result, the specific feeling, not a brochure description of your business. We write and shoot this the way a real Chinese traveler would post it, because that is what gets trusted, saved, and repeated by other users. For the full mechanics of how discovery and search work on the platform, we point clients to the definitive guide to Xiaohongshu marketing, which we also use internally.

Step four, make it bookable in the way Chinese travelers actually book. A note that goes viral and then dead-ends on a foreign-language contact form is money left on the table. We set up a booking path that matches how Xiaohongshu users move from inspiration to reservation, tied to a destination page that ranks for the right searches. That is a big part of what our destination marketing work covers for clients.

Step five, seed it with the right voices. A handful of well-matched creators trying the class first, honestly, gives the content credibility that paid ads cannot buy. We cover how to pick them properly in our guide on recruiting the right opinion leaders for Chinese tourists.

None of this requires you to change what you make or what you sell. It requires you to package 90 minutes of it as an experience with a name, a takeaway, and a story, instead of a stop on a bus route.

Why this matters now, not later

Xiaohongshu is not hinting at this trend anymore. They put it on stage at a summit and gave it a name. Platforms that formalize a behavior tend to reward it with reach for another year or two, before the format gets crowded and expensive to enter. Right now, a well-built interest class from a Western winery, distillery, or workshop is still a novelty in Chinese travelers’ feeds. In two years it will be the baseline expectation.

We already cover the broader playbook for showing up in Chinese travelers’ discovery feeds in our piece on attracting Chinese tourists through Xiaohongshu, and the wider set of channels in our tourism marketing services. If you run a tourism business and you have a “making” moment hiding somewhere inside your standard tour, that moment is probably your next Xiaohongshu hit. We just need to cut it down to 90 minutes and give it a name.

Source: 网易: 蔡红 “旅游兴趣班”何以征服年轻人 (NetEase, Chinese-language feature on why “travel interest classes” are winning over young Chinese travelers).

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