As China continues to expand its visa-free policies, inbound tourism is benefiting from a new wave of growth, with the number of foreign visitors entering the country rising steadily year after year. In the first half of 2026, China ranked first in Asia in terms of inbound foreign arrivals.
Local entrepreneurs and tourism practitioners, including the Muma team, which specializes in immersive local travel experiences for international visitors, are seizing the opportunity by creating locally focused trips for young international travelers, with routes to places such as Genyen in western Sichuan.
Foreign visitors are no longer content with simply checking off famous landmarks. Increasingly, they are seeking immersive, everyday experiences that allow them to experience China like locals. The spontaneous, vivid moments where languages and cultures intersect have become one of the distinctive attractions of inbound travel.
The profile of inbound travelers is also changing, shifting from traditional large group tours toward independent travelers and small groups, while demand is evolving from sightseeing and landmark check-ins to deeper cultural experiences.
These changes on the demand side are forcing a restructuring of the industry’s supply chain. In the past, travel agencies mainly focused on providing on-the-ground services; today, customer acquisition, regulatory compliance, and cross-border services have all become new challenges.
Meanwhile, suppliers such as hotels and attractions are increasingly dealing directly with international independent travelers, exposing gaps in areas such as international card acceptance, passport verification, and multilingual services. Ironically, China’s highly developed digital ecosystem can itself create a digital divide for overseas visitors. Visa-free access solves the question of “Can I enter China?”—but the real test for inbound tourism lies in whether the entire service ecosystem can effectively serve international travelers from start to finish.
China’s tourism industry has undergone a highly compressed development cycle, and OTA platforms are no longer simply transactional intermediaries.
They are increasingly building the “invisible infrastructure” of inbound tourism, systematically removing friction across the entire inbound travel journey.
Take Trip.com Group as an example. On one hand, the platform is investing in global brand marketing—working with ambassadors and running campaigns overseas—to proactively showcase Chinese destinations to international audiences.
On the other, it is partnering with airlines to lower booking barriers for overseas travelers and launching short-stay airport experience programs, reducing the friction that may discourage foreign visitors from choosing China.
Trip.com is also addressing gaps in inbound services across key touchpoints such as accommodation, attractions, and payments.
It has translated information for hundreds of thousands of hotels into more than a dozen languages, while establishing inbound-service standards and traveler-demand tags for hotels.
At hundreds of attractions, it has introduced self-service ticketing using passports and multilingual official websites. It has also built a cross-border payment system that supports multiple currencies, international bank cards, and overseas e-wallets.
From inspiring international travelers to visit China, to booking, arrival, accommodation, sightseeing, and payment, this end-to-end digital infrastructure is gradually bridging service gaps across the inbound travel experience.
