People travelling from China to Europe plan differently from what most businesses here assume. Where they eat, shop and sleep is often decided weeks before departure – and it isn’t decided on Google. It’s decided on Rednote (Xiaohongshu, 小红书), China’s largest lifestyle and travel platform.
How the search actually works
People search in Chinese, by city and category: “Vienna food”, “Munich restaurant recommendations”, “Barcelona paella”. What comes back isn’t advertising but posts by other travellers – with photos, prices, addresses and a location tag that opens the business on the map.
The result is a recommendation list. If you’re on it, you get visited. If you’re missing, you don’t exist for these guests – not even when your place is two streets away and better.
How short that list really is
We counted this rather than claiming it. In September 2026 we analysed, for nine European cities, the five searches Chinese-speaking travellers actually make before going out to eat, and looked for the names of every food business in the city. That comes to 2,193 posts and 53,232 businesses checked.
| City | posts | businesses | named |
|---|---|---|---|
| Madrid | 212 | 8,522 | 39 |
| Berlin | 187 | 11,386 | 38 |
| Milan | 216 | 5,843 | 38 |
| Rome | 202 | 6,237 | 34 |
| Munich | 213 | 4,125 | 32 |
| Barcelona | 195 | 6,434 | 27 |
| Lisbon | 159 | 4,064 | 24 |
| Hamburg | 219 | 4,867 | 17 |
| Vienna | 189 | 1,754 | 14 |
In no city do more than 39 businesses appear at all. In Vienna it’s fourteen. And most of those are named exactly once – on a platform where posts keep being found for years, that means, in practice: not named.
The competition for these guests hasn’t started in Europe yet. That’s unusual – normally a channel is either unclaimed or relevant, rarely both.
What makes this platform different from Instagram
Two findings from the same data explain why the usual social-media reflexes don’t apply here.
Things get saved more than liked. Among posts whose titles read as a recommendation list – “guide”, “must-eat”, “recommendation” – saves run higher than likes: 181,095 to 153,004. These posts aren’t a pastime, they’re trip planning. They get put away and opened again weeks later.
They’re photo sets, not videos. Of the 2,193 posts, 2,081 are image posts and 112 are videos. Anyone coming from European social media who thinks of Reels first is looking in the wrong place.
What helps and what doesn’t
Three things matter:
- The location tag. Without it, a post is a picture with no address. With it, your business becomes findable on the map and collects every post that names it.
- Chinese search terms. Not translated, but phrased the way Chinese users actually search. That’s the difference between being found and meaning well.
- Posts by real users. Your own account is useful, but it doesn’t replace a recommendation. What pulls is a post from a guest who was there.
A Chinese version of your website is explicitly not on that list. People don’t search on your site, they search in the app, and what counts there is what others write about you. A business without a website at all can do well on Rednote; a fully translated site changes nothing about being found there.
What honestly can’t be promised
Nobody can guarantee you guest numbers, revenue or reach on this platform – anyone who does doesn’t know it. What can be influenced is findability: whether you appear at all when somebody searches for your city and your category. Everything after that depends on whether your business convinces people – as it does everywhere else.
And the numbers above are a snapshot. Rednote’s ranking is personalised and changes daily; what we counted is how often a name appears, not how it is judged. A mention can also be a warning.
The first step costs nothing
Before building anything, it’s worth looking at where you stand: what’s already there about your city and your category? Are you being mentioned without knowing it? Which of your competitors are visible? We do this analysis free and without obligation – and if the step isn’t worth it for you, we’ll say so.
What such an analysis looks like is set out in detail in our city surveys for Munich, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome and Vienna.