Xiaohongshu and Singapore Tourism Board Just Signaled the End of Guide-Book Travel Marketing

On May 22, 2026, Xiaohongshu Business signed a strategic memorandum of understanding with the Singapore Tourism Board. I read the announcement twice before it clicked. It is not a marketing partnership like the dozens I have seen from other platforms. It is a bet on a different idea of how Chinese people travel.

The idea has a name in Chinese: 跟着兴趣走, “follow your interest.” It replaces the older habit, 攻略出境游, which means planning your outbound trip around a guide. For years, Chinese travelers picked a country first, then searched for things to do there. Xiaohongshu and Singapore are now betting on the opposite order. A traveler falls for a dish, a craft, a specific activity. Only after that do they decide where to go and live it.

What Xiaohongshu and Singapore actually agreed to

Strip away the press language and the deal is simple. Singapore becomes the test market for an interest-first approach to outbound tourism content. Xiaohongshu brings the audience and the data. Singapore brings a destination willing to be marketed by hobby and craving instead of by monument and itinerary.

The numbers behind the deal are worth sitting with. More than 130 million users discuss and plan outbound trips on Xiaohongshu every month. Over 90% of them are not browsing idly, they are actively searching for specific, usable travel information. Across nearly 3,000 product categories tracked by the platform, the average seed-to-ROI ratio sits at 6.0. That last number matters more than it looks. It means content built around a genuine interest converts into bookings and spending at a rate most destination marketing never reaches.

A second Chinese report on the same conference adds useful detail. It notes that Xiaohongshu is not treating outbound Chinese travelers as one audience. The platform has broken them into distinct groups, including one segment the report calls “anti-rat-race parents,” a demographic pursuing quality time and relaxation over the box-ticking group tours their own parents once took. That single detail tells you everything about why “follow your interest” beats “here is our itinerary.” Different travelers are chasing different things, and lumping them together is how you lose them.

A boutique hotel group in the Alps that sold the wrong thing for six years

Let me tell you about a client I’ll call Marc. He ran a small group of mountain hotels in the Alps. Beautiful properties. A view that makes people stop talking when they walk onto the terrace. For six years, every piece of content his team put out led with that view. Snow-capped peaks, golden hour, the word “breathtaking” in every caption.

It did not work. Chinese bookings sat under 3% of total guests, year after year, despite a marketing budget that was not small. Marc’s team kept adding more photos of the same mountain. More drone shots. A new brochure. Nothing moved.

Here is the moment it clicked for him. We pulled Xiaohongshu search data for his region and the mountain barely showed up. What did show up, again and again, was cheese. Specifically, the ritual of raclette and fondue made tableside, the melting, the scraping, the smell people described in their posts even though smell cannot travel through a screen. Chinese travelers were not searching “Alps hotel.” They were searching “melted cheese Europe winter experience.”

Marc’s honest reaction was something like: we’ve been sitting on this for six years and showing people a mountain instead. I don’t say that to make him look bad. I say it because almost every destination and hotel group I talk to is doing the same thing. You fall in love with your own view. Your guest falls in love with something much smaller and much more specific.

We rebuilt his content around the cheese ritual first, the mountain second. Local KOCs filmed the tableside scrape in close-up. Captions stopped describing scenery and started describing a craving. Within four months, Chinese direct bookings moved from under 3% to just above 11% of total guests, and the average stay length grew by almost a full night, because people who come for a ritual tend to want a second dinner to do it again. That is what “follow your interest” looks like when it actually reaches a business.

Why this matters even if you have never heard of Singapore Tourism Board

Singapore is the test case, not the whole story. When a national tourism board and Xiaohongshu formalize a strategy at this level, it becomes the reference every other destination on the platform gets measured against. Algorithms, ad products, and creator recommendations get tuned around what works for the pilot. If you sell hotel rooms, tours, or a destination to Chinese travelers and your content still leads with geography, you are marketing into a system that is quietly moving away from geography-first thinking.

I wrote at length about the mechanics of this platform in how to attract Chinese tourists through Little Red Book, and the short version is this: Xiaohongshu users treat the app as a search engine for real experiences, not a scroll-and-forget feed. That behavior is exactly what makes interest-first content work. People are already looking for the specific thing you have to offer. Your job is to be findable when they search for it, not to hope they stumble onto your destination’s name.

For a broader look at how outbound Chinese travel decisions get made across platforms, I’d point you to the ultimate guide to marketing to Chinese tourists, which covers the full decision journey beyond Xiaohongshu alone.

How we build an interest-first campaign, step by step

This is not theory for us. It is the same process we ran for Marc, and it is what our destination marketing service is built around. Three steps, in order.

• Find the real interest, not the assumed one. We pull Xiaohongshu search and note data for your region before writing a single caption. We are looking for the specific noun Chinese travelers already type when they think about your area: a dish, a craft, a festival, an activity. It is rarely the thing your own marketing has been leading with.
• Build content around that noun, not around your logo. Once we know the interest, we brief local creators and KOCs to document it up close. Texture, sound, the small ritual of doing the thing. The destination or hotel becomes the setting for the interest, not the headline.
• Measure what actually moves, not what looks good. We track the same seed-to-ROI logic Xiaohongshu itself reports on: how much a note costs to seed, and how much booking or inquiry volume it produces. If a piece of content gets likes but no clicks to your booking page, we kill it and try a sharper angle on the same interest.

There is a Chinese term worth knowing here: 种草, zhǒngcǎo, which means “planting grass.” It describes the moment a post makes someone want something so specifically that the craving takes root. A good travel note does not sell a country. It plants one very small, very specific want, and lets the traveler do the rest of the searching themselves. That is the entire logic behind the 6.0 seed-to-ROI ratio Xiaohongshu reports, and it is the logic Singapore just agreed to build its outbound strategy on.

Finding the right creators to do this well is its own skill. We cover how we vet and brief them in how to recruit the best opinion leaders for attracting Chinese tourists, and the broader playbook for shaping a destination’s story around what actually moves Chinese travelers sits in marketing strategies to attract Chinese tourists.

What I’d ask you to do this week

Open your own content and count how many posts lead with a place name versus a specific thing to do or taste. If the place name wins, you are still marketing the way Chinese travelers moved away from before this MOU even existed. The Singapore pilot is going to accelerate that shift across the whole platform, not slow it down.

Marc did not need a bigger budget. He needed to stop showing people a mountain and start showing them the cheese. Somewhere in your own destination or hotel is the equivalent of that cheese. Find it before your competitor does.

Source: 每日经济新闻: “攻略出境游”到”跟着兴趣走”，小红书商业与新加坡旅游局MOU签订开启新一程 (Daily Economic News, Chinese-language report on the Xiaohongshu-Singapore Tourism Board partnership, May 22, 2026). Additional detail on demographic segmentation from 经济信息网: “攻略出境游”到”跟着兴趣走”，小红书商业与新加坡旅游局MOU签订开启新一程 (Economic Information Network, May 22, 2026).

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