China’s Tourists are Ghosting Europe
Here is where mainland Chinese travellers flew this summer, in order, per Tongcheng Travel's forecast: Seoul, Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jeju, Bali, Chiang Mai, Phuket, Ho Chi Minh City, London.
Read down that list and notice what's missing before you notice what's there.
Japan has been a fixture of Chinese outbound travel for two decades and it does not appear once. Tokyo and Osaka are both absent from a ranking that found room for Chiang Mai and Phuket. Thailand takes three of the ten slots on its own, and seven of the ten sit in Southeast Asia.
Then there's London, the city where Chinese luxury tourism went to spend money for twenty years, scraping in at number ten behind a Korean island of 670,000 people best known for its tangerines.
The volume data lands in the same place from a different angle. China Trading Desk booking figures for June to August put Seoul first with 2.15 million mainland arrivals, up 14% year on year, and Hong Kong second at roughly 1.94 million. Kuala Lumpur up 16%. Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi both inside the top ten.
Two firms counting different things and arriving at the same map.
The number that looks like good news and isn't
Hong Kong and Macau together now account for close to 40% of the entire Chinese outbound market.
If you sell luxury goods, your first instinct on reading that is relief. The customer is still traveling, still shopping, just doing it three hours from home instead of eleven. Move the budget, follow them over, carry on.
Then you look at what gets spent on arrival.
Hong Kong expects around 41 million mainland trips this year at an average of roughly $310 a head.
Three hundred and ten dollars. That is a nice lunch, a bag of skincare and the train back. It is not a handbag, and it is certainly not the four-figure basket a Chinese visitor used to put together on Bond Street.
So the 40% is real and it means something different from what it looks like. The trips relocated to Asia. The high-value transaction did not go with them.
The obvious answer is already wrong
The reflex response to all this is to shift Chinese-tourist marketing money from Europe to Asia, and specifically to Korea and Japan, because that's where the arrivals went.
Half of that is right. The Japan half is a mistake.
Chinese visitors to Tokyo fell 26% this summer, and no Japanese city made the outbound top ten at all. Japan had been a perennial favourite and the traffic went backwards sharply, on reporting that attributes it to tensions between the two countries.
Thailand is the opposite trap. It holds three of the top ten slots, so the volume is plainly there, and the Association of Thai Travel Agents still cut its 2026 target for Chinese arrivals from 9 million down to 7 million, citing safety concerns and unhelpful coverage circulating on Chinese social media. A market can be top-ranked and losing confidence at the same time.
Which tells you something more useful than any individual ranking. This map redraws itself faster than you can sign a lease. Seoul is up 14% and Tokyo is down 26% in the same summer, on the same continent, for the same customer.
If your China strategy is a bet on which foreign city your customer will be standing in next August, you are gambling with a very long settlement period.
Why the long-haul trip stopped
Three things are pushing in the same direction.
The first is visibility. Chinese high-net-worth travellers have gone quiet on long-haul luxury shopping trips, because a large purchase abroad leaves a legible trail of offshore wealth, and legible is currently unfashionable. It's the same pressure that showed up in the top-25 luxury brands dropping 10% in China's July sales. The wealthy didn't stop buying. They started buying smaller things, more often, closer to home.
The second is that short trips got frictionless. China's 240-hour transit visa-free arrangement now covers 57 countries across 65 ports, with Kyrgyzstan and Vietnam added in August, and several regional partners run reciprocal visa-free access the other way. When a four-day trip requires no planning, you take four of them a year instead of one big one. Frequency replaces duration, and duration is what fills a shopping basket.
The third is arithmetic. The yuan has been softer against the euro and the pound than against most Asian currencies, so a European luxury purchase got more expensive at precisely the moment it also got more conspicuous. Two reasons pointing the same way, and neither of them has anything to do with whether Chinese consumers still like your brand.
So where did the money actually go
Some of it went to the regional cities, in smaller pieces. Under-30s doing four and five day beauty and fashion runs in Seoul. Middle-class families in Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City. A genuine high-net-worth tail still landing in Hong Kong and Macau for jewellery and watches, and still going to Paris, Milan and Geneva on longer trips, in much smaller numbers.
But the bulk of it went home.
Chinese consumers are buying on Xiaohongshu's cross-border shop, on Tmall Global and on JD International, at duty-inclusive prices, from the sofa. And when they want something to be seen with, they increasingly buy Chinese: Laopu Gold, Songmont, Icicle.
The purchase that used to happen in a European flagship largely stopped being a travel purchase. That's the whole story, and every recommendation below follows from it.
What to do about it
Reforecast tourist retail as a shrinking channel and say so out loud. If your finance team still models Chinese-tourist revenue in London or Paris against a 2019 base, they are forecasting a customer whose behaviour has changed for three separate reasons, none of which resolve next year. Put the new base case in writing now. The version where you discover this during a budget review in eighteen months is considerably more expensive than the version where you say it in September.
Stop chasing the map. Seoul is up 14% and Tokyo is down 26% in the same season. Any plan that depends on knowing which city your customers will be in next summer will be wrong before the fit-out is finished. Build for where they live, which doesn't move, rather than where they holiday, which moves every quarter.
Get the cross-border funnel working, because that is where your European sale went. If you are not on Xiaohongshu's shop, Tmall Global or JD International with duty-inclusive pricing, you have no route to a customer spending roughly what they used to spend in Europe, from home, on platforms they open every day. This is the single highest-return item on the list and it's the one most Western brands keep deferring because it's operationally annoying.
In Hong Kong, build for two customers and price for neither average. The $310 average conceals a barbell: a very large number of day-trippers and a small tail of serious buyers. Merchandise and staff for both, and get your signage and service into Mandarin rather than Cantonese-only, because a meaningful share of your footfall crossed a border to get there. A store built for the average customer in that market is built for a customer who doesn't exist.
