Are foreigners no longer keen on shopping in China?

01

After the National Day holiday, I had tea with several friends who run inbound local travel services.

Lao Lu has been handling European tour groups for more than 20 years, while Lao Zhao mainly receives Southeast Asian FIT visitors. Talking about the increasingly common foreign tourists on the streets of Beijing recently, both of them admitted that the number of foreigners has indeed risen, and business is more prosperous than in previous years.

But when I casually asked if they were spending heavily, the two gave surprisingly similar answers in unison: the visitors are back, but there is barely any profit from shopping-related business.

Lao Lu said that for both Dutch and German groups he received this year, the organizing agencies would privately advise them to remove shopping stops from itineraries. The reason is simple: such products do not sell well, and visitors are not receptive to them.

Based on actual reception records, Lao Lu noted that many foreigners would rather ride bicycles for two hours to tour Beijing's Central Axis and go back to the hotel to rest in the afternoon than spare time for the "featured shopping" mentioned by tour guides.

Lao Zhao smiled as he listened, saying that nowadays when young people from Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore come to Beijing, let alone arranging shopping for them, they book flights and hotels all by themselves. Many of them can even speak Chinese, so what they need is nothing more than cost-effective day tours covering the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and the National Museum of China.

Lao Zhao emphasized that any travel product that includes folk-custom shopping experience on its detail page will get zero attention, even if the product is very cheap.

On the other side of the coin, as inbound shopping tours cool down, the foreign tourists that tourism practitioners have been waiting for for years are indeed pouring in.

This summer, Europe suffered persistent extreme high temperatures. From mid-June to mid-August alone, about 80 million Europeans experienced weather above 40℃. Some tourists adjusted their vacation plans temporarily, making China an option for escaping the summer heat.

In late July, data released by Trip.com showed that European countries accounted for 30% of the main source markets of inbound tourists during the summer vacation, with the number of orders to China surging 275% year on year, and the overall growth rate in Western European markets such as the UK, France and Germany was close to 150%.

HopeGoo, a platform under Tongcheng Travel, also found that since July, the booking popularity of flights from European cities including London and Madrid to China has increased by more than 20% month on month.

However, the shopping business brought by the growing number of tourists is not what many travel agencies expected.

The data from Ningbo is the most illustrative.

In the first 8 months of this year, Ningbo Lishe International Airport verified 563 tax refund applications for departure tax refund, up 98.9% year on year. The total value of tax-refunded goods reached 28.171 million yuan, with a year-on-year growth of only 37.4%.

Calculated based on this data, the average value of goods per application dropped from about 72,000 yuan in the same period of last year to around 50,000 yuan, a decrease of over 30%. That means while the coverage of tax refund is expanding, large-value consumption has not increased at the same pace.

A similar situation also appeared in Shanghai. In the first half of this year, the number of verified departure tax refund application forms by Shanghai Customs increased by nearly three times year on year, while the value of tax-refunded goods only rose by 58%. The growth rate of the number of applications is also far higher than that of the total value.

Hearing this, Lao Lu picked up his teacup and smiled.

He said frankly that times have changed. The number of foreigners is growing, and the amount they are willing to spend on trips in China is also rising. But the traditional business of earning commission from shopping is no longer easy to run.

02

Behind the fact that traditional shopping stores are losing appeal to foreign tourists, there are two accounts to be clarified.

Before the pandemic, the shopping stops for traditional inbound tour groups were usually packaged as sightseeing items. Tour guides would first take guests to watch jade carving, explain the material and cultural connotations of the jade, then lead them into the sales area, where they could not leave until the agreed time.

Similar products have not disappeared to this day. On the overseas travel platform Viator, you can still find Beijing day tour products that combine the Mutianyu Great Wall with a jade factory visit.

In the historical reviews of Beijing jade shopping spots on Tripadvisor, some visitors approved the on-site explanation, while others mentioned that shopping was a fixed part of the tour arrangement, and they found similar products much cheaper elsewhere after leaving.

But as for how much the products are actually worth and how to judge their quality, the "unsuspecting foreigners" in those years who could not understand Chinese could hardly find the answers quickly. Since the price information was controlled by merchants and tour groups were led by guides to designated stores, the shopping spots could get transaction opportunities far higher than ordinary shopping malls.

But the situation has long changed. The "changes of times" mentioned by Lao Lu first appeared in tourists' mobile phones.

Visitors can check reviews before departure, contact local service providers via email or social platforms, and get a clear idea of product prices by asking ChatGPT or Gemini. The information gap formed by unfamiliar surroundings is quickly erased by smartphones.

What makes foreigners more alert is actually the time cost behind shopping.

After entering the store, it takes energy to identify products, bargaining is very troublesome, and it is not easy to turn down sales pitches. For a long trip to China, spending two or three hours buying souvenirs of unknown origin is becoming less and less cost-effective.

Let alone foreigners are not interested in such arrangements, even we Chinese ourselves complain a lot about the routine-style shopping in places like Yunnan.

However, the decline of traditional shopping tours does not mean that foreign tourists are starting to reject Chinese goods. Beijing's Xiushui Street is still crowded with foreigners. The People's Daily cited an introduction from the person in charge of Xiushui Street last August that from January to July 2025, the number of inbound tourists received by the mall doubled year on year, and its sales revenue grew by 80%.

The difference is that Xiushui Street no longer only sells traditional tourist commodities such as silk and porcelain. Clothing, shoes, bags and electronic products have become the key consumption targets. Customized clothing can be completed in as fast as 18 hours, and tourists can also experience calligraphy and inside-painting of snuff bottles on site.

In other words, the products in Xiushui have clear practical functions, and the purchasing process itself is full of experience, so foreigners are still willing to pay for them.

The second account comes from the wallets of the visitors.

A survey released by the European Travel Commission in April this year shows that 82% of the surveyed Europeans plan to travel in spring and summer, hitting the highest level since 2020. But their trips are getting shorter, and their budgets are more cautious.

The proportion of high-spending groups who plan to spend more than 1,500 euros per trip has dropped by 9%. Accommodation remains the top priority in the budget, followed by catering and local activities at the destination.

This reminds me of the local friends I met when I lived in Finland many years ago. They dressed plainly in daily life and had little interest in buying new clothes, but their family vacations were arranged long in advance, and their travel calendars were fully scheduled.

When I asked about my confusion, a friend living in Helsinki told me that for Finnish middle-class people, it is a habit to own two houses: one in the city, and another holiday house by the lake. They have about five weeks of vacation every year, which must be fully used no matter for domestic or outbound trips.

In his view, Finns attach great importance to the travel experience itself, because a piece of clothing can be worn for several years, but the memories left by a trip can last a lifetime.

At that time, I only thought Europeans had low material desires. After visiting more places later, I realized that they have a different priority for spending money.

Nowadays, with rising living costs and more uncertainties in the economic outlook, many European families are still reluctant to cancel their trips, and shopping without clear value will undoubtedly be the first item to be deleted from their plans.

03

When Lao Lu was young, making money from inbound tourism was much easier.

He recalled that in the 1990s, there was a foreign-related porcelain store at the foot of the Great Wall. After the tour bus drove in, the tour guide would first take foreigners to watch artisans throw pottery, then listen to the staff introduce the origin of cloisonné and blue and white porcelain.

Now, the itinerary sheet on his desk has taken on a new look. Some time ago, Lao Lu received a Spanish group, and the clients took the initiative to request a zero-shopping mode. The half-day reserved for shopping stores was replaced by intangible cultural heritage handicraft experience, and the fixed group meal was changed to a home-cooked meal in a hutong family.

The adjusted itinerary is not cheap, as it requires advance reservation of the studio and foreign language guides for small groups, but the guests did not raise much objection to the extra cost.

From this, Lao Lu found that foreign tourists are not reluctant to spend money, but the traditional model of travel agencies earning commission from shopping stores must be reformed, and the itinerary design and organization services need to be more detailed.

The industry is waking up, and policy supervision is also making efforts. Before the National Day holiday, Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism put forward clear requirements for group shopping: tour guides must not take tourists to unrecorded shopping stores through coercion or inducement, and itineraries recorded as free activities must not be arbitrarily changed to centralized shopping arrangements.

This means that the old business model of tour guides leading people into shopping stores is facing stricter constraints.

As for how to turn the growing number of inbound tourists into profits for every travel agency, the recent changes in Nanjing provide a new idea. From January to July this year, Nanjing received 403,000 inbound overnight tourists, up 15.1% year on year, and its foreign exchange earnings from tourism reached 665 million US dollars, with a year-on-year increase of 25.9%.

On Trip.com, the transaction value of Nanjing day tours increased by 124.7% year on year. In addition to the Confucius Temple and the Ming City Wall, local travel agencies have begun to integrate industrial resources into travel itineraries. Some European inspection groups have visited intelligent manufacturing workshops for transformers, and foreign tourists have visited robotics enterprises. Factories that used to serve investment promotion and business exchanges are gradually becoming new windows for people to learn about China.

For first-time visitors to China, the appeal of contemporary China is no less than that of ancient cities and palaces. How new energy vehicles are produced and what robots can do are also content that they are willing to pay to learn about.

However, it is easy to remove shopping stops from itineraries, but much harder to develop mature products. Factories need to coordinate their production schedules, and handle safety and commercial information protection issues. If the handicraft experience only includes a short demonstration and the rest of the time is still used for product promotion, it will soon become a shopping store with a new signboard. What travel agencies really need to make up for is probably the ability to turn scattered resources into products that can be sold repeatedly.

It is worth noting that experience and shopping can also be seamlessly connected again. Just like tourists are usually willing to take the shadow puppet they painted by themselves home, after learning about the production process of cloisonné, some people will take the initiative to buy their favorite finished products. At this time, the commodity becomes an extension of the travel experience, and consumption happens more naturally.

Before the meeting ended that day, Lao Lu showed me the hutong shadow puppet studio he had just contacted on his mobile phone. He planned to replace the original fixed shopping period with a half-day experience, allowing guests to color the shadow puppets by themselves and learn to perform for a few minutes with the teacher. Lao Lu calculated that even if each shadow puppet cannot be sold at a very high price, both the studio and the travel agency can get reasonable income from the experience. He believes he has seen the new direction of the inflow of foreign exchange, as the trend starts from small trivial signs.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Lvjie", author: Theodore Xishao, published with authorization from 36Kr.