Your Chinese guests decided before they arrived.

When a group from Shanghai is sitting in your restaurant, it is rarely chance. The decision was made weeks earlier, on a screen in China.

Where the decision is made

Chinese travellers plan differently. Not on Google, not on TripAdvisor, not on Booking, but on RedNote (小红书, also Xiaohongshu): enter a city, enter a category, read what other travellers wrote and photographed. Whoever appears there is on the list. Whoever is missing does not exist for these guests — even if their restaurant is two hundred metres further along.

How you notice they are already here

Usually the floor staff notice first: more guests who would rather order in Chinese; tables where every dish is photographed before anyone eats; guests asking for a specific dish that is not on the menu but was in a post. Follow that up and you can often find the post.

If that is what you are seeing at your tables right now: Why are Chinese guests suddenly coming to us? answers it step by step — including how to check for yourself what has been written about you.

How many businesses are prepared

We counted, and we counted where the searching happens. In September 2026 we analysed, across nine European cities, the five searches Chinese-speaking travellers actually make before going out to eat — 2,193 posts, matched against 53,232 food businesses. In none of those cities do more than 39 businesses appear by name at all; in Vienna it is fourteen (survey and method).

A Chinese website is not the answer — the searching happens on RedNote, not on your site. It is an indicator: where nobody maintains a Chinese page, nobody has usually looked at what is being written about the place either.

If you don't run a restaurant

The same finding applies to hotels, wineries with tours, spas, manufacturers, retail and private education providers — only with different search terms. What we can back for which segment, and what we can't yet, is on Who we work with.

What the first step is

Looking. We do that free of charge: how often does your business come up on RedNote, who is posting, what is praised, what is criticised, and how do comparable businesses in your city compare? You get the result in writing, with a straight assessment of whether the effort is worth it for you. If it is not, we say so.