Xiaohongshu Confirms 2.4 Billion Travel Searches: What the 2026 Summit Data Means for Your Hotel

On April 23, 2026, Xiaohongshu stood in front of its biggest travel and hospitality partners in Tongxiang and said something that should worry any hotel or tourism board still running the same Google Ads campaign it built five years ago. The platform confirmed it now has more than 230 million monthly active users with a travel interest, generating over 2.4 billion travel searches. And for the first time, it put this in plain numbers: the way Chinese travelers decide where to go has changed.

I have spent ten years in this industry. First at CITS, then on the acquisition side at Ctrip, before I started Chinese Tourists Agency here in Shanghai. I have watched a lot of platform hype come and go. This one is different, because the data holds up.

What Xiaohongshu Confirmed at Its 2026 Tourism Summit

At the summit, held in Tongxiang’s Puyuan Fashion Ancient Town, Xiaohongshu laid out numbers that matter to anyone selling rooms, tours, or restaurant seats to Chinese travelers. More than 80% of its travel users now open the app to read 攻略 (gonglüe, “practical guides”) before they pick a destination, a hotel, or a place to eat. The hashtag #跟着兴趣去旅行 (“travel by following your interest”) has collected 1.7 billion views. Daily time spent on the app by travel users climbed to about 70 minutes, up 10% from 2024.

You can read the full coverage in China Daily’s report on the summit, which lays out how Xiaohongshu framed this as a formal shift in travel decision logic. A separate write-up from Tianmai Finance (天脉财经) confirms the same figures: 230 million monthly travel-interest users, 1.7 billion views on the interest hashtag, and an 11% jump in app usage frequency among travel users compared to 2024.

From “Where Should I Go” to “What Do I Want to Feel”

For years, the standard path was simple: pick a destination first, then figure out what to do there. Xiaohongshu says that order has flipped. Users now start from a feeling or an activity, learning to ski, tasting natural wine, chasing a sunset over a specific kind of cliff, and only then look for the place that delivers it. The platform groups these motivations into five buckets it tracks for brands: social interest, skill interest, culture interest, nature interest, and lifestyle interest.

That sounds abstract until you run a hotel. It means a guest is not searching “hotels in your city.” She is searching “where can I learn to make pasta with a local family” or “quiet beach town, good for solo women, not too touristy.” If your content never answers those questions, you do not exist to her, no matter how many stars you have on Google.

Xiaohongshu also published a report this year on inbound travel, foreigners visiting China, which tells me the platform is not stopping at outbound. It wants to own the search behavior on both sides of every trip. For a Western hotel or destination trying to reach Chinese travelers, that is the clearest signal yet that this is not a side channel anymore. It is where the decision gets made.

The Resort That Spent Its Whole China Budget on Google, and Missed the Real Story

Let me tell you about Marc. Not his real name, but every word of this could describe five different marketing directors I have talked to this year.

Marc runs marketing for a small alpine resort group, four properties, a solid brand, a real product. For two years straight he put close to $90,000 a year into Google Ads and Instagram, targeting “luxury ski China.” How many bookings could he trace back to those campaigns? He told me himself: close to zero.

I asked him why he never touched Xiaohongshu. He said, and I am not making this up: “Isn’t that just for makeup and skincare?”

Fair question five years ago. Wrong answer today.

What woke Marc up was not a report. It was a competitor. A smaller resort two valleys over posted one 笔记 (a “note,” the basic content format on Xiaohongshu) about their staff teaching Chinese guests to make raclette by hand. Nothing fancy, a phone camera, a real moment. That one note passed 200,000 likes. Six months later, that resort was booked solid for the whole Chinese New Year period, with a waiting list.

Marc’s resort, same season: two mainland Chinese bookings, and one of them was a travel agent doing a site visit.

Here is the part that stings. Marc’s first move was to just repost his Instagram content on Xiaohongshu, same photos, same captions, translated. It flopped. Almost no views, no saves, nothing. Xiaohongshu is not a place to dump content made somewhere else. It is a search engine and a decision tool. People come there to solve a question: where do I take my kids, what do I wear on the slopes, how do I ski if I have never skied in my life. Polished brand photography does not answer that. A guide does.

We rebuilt his content from zero: a real 攻略-style guide to skiing in the Alps for first-time Chinese visitors, honest answers to the questions people actually type in, “多少钱” (how much does it cost), “适合新手吗” (is it good for beginners), “怎么去” (how do I get there). We seeded a handful of Chinese ski enthusiasts already active on the platform, small accounts with real followers, not the biggest names on the app.

Four months in, Marc’s resort had 41 direct booking inquiries traced back to Xiaohongshu, and 9 confirmed group bookings for the following winter. Not because we spent more on ads. Because we finally answered the question his future guests were already typing into the search bar.

How We Build a Xiaohongshu Presence From Zero

If your hotel, resort, or destination has never posted a single note on Xiaohongshu, here is what we actually do in the first 90 days.

Week 1 to 2, search audit. We pull the 攻略 already written about your destination, your city, your category of hotel, sometimes your exact property if a past Chinese guest already wrote about it. We map the questions people ask and the ones nobody has answered yet. This tells us what to publish first, not what feels good to write.

Week 3 to 4, first content. We publish the first 3 to 5 笔记, each one answering a real search question, not a brand pitch. A guide to your neighborhood. A breakdown of your room types with real prices in RMB. A day-by-day itinerary that lists your property as one honest stop among several, not the only option in the world.

Month 2, cadence. We move to 2 to 3 notes a week, mixing practical guides, short video, and 种草 content (“planting grass,” the Xiaohongshu term for content built to make someone want something before they knew they wanted it). We also start light seeding with KOCs, ordinary travelers and small creators, not celebrity endorsements.

Month 3, what we measure. Not followers. We track saves (the strongest signal on this platform, because a save means someone plans to act on it later), search ranking for your target keywords inside the app, comments asking booking questions, and direct messages. If a property is not getting saves and messages by day 90, we change the content, not the budget.

We laid out more of this approach in an earlier piece on how to attract Chinese tourists through the Little Red Book app, and the broader playbook lives on our services page. If you want the strategy side before the execution, our guide to marketing strategies to attract Chinese tourists is a good place to start. Outside travel specifically, our sister site marketingtochina.com has a useful piece on Xiaohongshu marketing for business that applies the same logic to other industries.

Xiaohongshu did not invent Chinese travelers’ taste for honest, personal content. It just built the platform where that taste turns into a booking. The numbers from this summit are not a trend to watch from the sidelines. 230 million people are already there, reading guides, saving notes, deciding where to go next. The only question left is whether your property shows up when they search.

Source: China Daily: 兴趣所向，生意所往：2026小红书文旅峰会发布”兴趣驱动”新路径 (China Daily, Chinese-language coverage of Xiaohongshu’s 2026 tourism summit and its “interest-driven” travel data).

---