Why are Chinese guests suddenly coming to us?
Because someone wrote about you. Before they travel, Chinese guests decide where to eat and stay on Rednote (小红书, internationally Xiaohongshu): enter a city, enter a category, read what other travellers reported. If your restaurant, hotel or shop appears there in a post with a location tag, guests arrive in groups — often with the same dish in mind, without you ever having run an ad.
How do they know about us?
From another guest's post. A Rednote post almost always carries a location: your name and your address. Through that location, other users find everything written about you — months later, too. A single post that did well can keep working long after, without you ever hearing about it.
It takes no influencer with a large following. Rednote is searched like a search engine, not scrolled like a social network. Even a post with a few hundred views stays findable as long as it matches the query.
Why do they all order the same dish?
Because they read the same thing. That is the most reliable signal: strikingly many guests asking for one particular dish; tables where every plate is photographed before anyone eats; requests for something that isn't on the menu at all but was in a post. Follow it up and you can often find the post again.
How do I find out who wrote about us?
You can check this yourself in half an hour:
- Install the app — Rednote / 小红书, on the App Store and Google Play — and create an account. That is enough to read and search.
- Search for your city in Chinese plus a category. Examples: 法兰克福美食 (food in Frankfurt), 维也纳咖啡馆 (Viennese cafés), 柏林酒店 (Berlin hotels). Adding 攻略 ("travel guide") leads to the posts people plan from.
- Search your business name in Latin script. Chinese users usually write it the way it appears on your door.
- Tap the location on a post. That shows you what is attached to your address — and what is attached to the addresses of comparable businesses on your street.
Finding nothing does not mean there is nothing: search only ever shows a section of it, and without Chinese you easily miss the posts that matter. The reverse holds too — what you do find is real, and older than the first guest you noticed.
Is this good or a problem?
Good, to begin with. These are guests you would never have reached through Google, TripAdvisor or Booking, because that is simply not where they look. It only becomes a problem when nobody in the house knows: your service then faces groups with very clear expectations, unprepared — and the next disappointment ends up in a post as well. Knowing what is written about you is what lets you respond.
What happens if we do nothing?
Probably nothing bad, but nothing reliable either. Posts sink over time; if nothing follows, it goes quiet again and nobody in the house knows why. Visibility on Rednote does not come from one hit, it comes from people writing about you regularly.
How many businesses pay attention to this?
Very few. In September 2026 we analysed, across nine European cities, the five searches Chinese-speaking travellers use to pick a place to eat — 2,193 posts, matched against 53,232 businesses. In no city do more than 39 businesses appear by name; in Vienna it is fourteen (analysis and method). On the website side of the same finding: for Frankfurt it was 14 out of 2,756 businesses, for Vienna 15 out of 1,345.
A Chinese website is not the answer — people search on Rednote, not on your site. It is an indicator: where nobody maintains a Chinese page, as a rule nobody has looked at what is being written about the place either.
What is the first step?
Look. Yourself, using the steps above — or let us do it. We check free of charge how often your business appears on Rednote, who writes about it, what gets praised and what gets criticised, and how comparable businesses in your city are doing. You get the result in writing, with a clear assessment of whether the effort is worth it for you. If it isn't, we say so.
How the platform works as a whole is on Chinese guests: where they look for your business.