Every October, more than 600 million Chinese citizens take to the road, the rails, and the skies during Golden Week — one of the most powerful travel windows in the world. For Singapore’s tourism operators, hospitality brands, and retailers, this annual surge represents an enormous commercial opportunity. But here’s the challenge: Chinese travellers today don’t open Google or Instagram when they start dreaming about their next destination. They open Xiaohongshu.

Xiaohongshu (小红书), also known as RED or Little Red Book, has quietly become the most influential travel-planning platform among Chinese millennials and Gen Z consumers. With over 300 million registered users and a community built on authentic, peer-driven recommendations, it’s where destination decisions are made — often weeks before a single flight is booked. If your Singapore brand isn’t visible on Xiaohongshu before Golden Week, you’re essentially invisible to the travellers most likely to spend.

This guide is built specifically for Singapore marketers and tourism stakeholders who want a clear, actionable roadmap to capturing Chinese inbound travel during Golden Week through Xiaohongshu marketing. From content strategy and KOL partnerships to campaign timing and performance measurement, we cover everything you need to move from awareness to arrivals.

What Is Golden Week and Why Singapore Should Care

China’s Golden Week is a national holiday that runs for approximately seven days starting October 1st, coinciding with National Day celebrations. Alongside the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) Golden Week in January or February, it represents one of the two biggest travel windows in the Chinese calendar. During this period, outbound travel spikes dramatically, with popular destinations across Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, and beyond seeing a significant influx of Chinese visitors.

Singapore has historically been one of the top destinations for Chinese outbound travellers, and for good reason. The city-state offers a culturally familiar yet cosmopolitan experience, with Mandarin widely spoken, Halal-friendly food options, world-class shopping along Orchard Road, and easy visa access. According to the Singapore Tourism Board, China consistently ranks among Singapore’s top three visitor source markets. What’s changing is how these travellers discover, plan, and decide on their trips — and that shift points squarely at platforms like Xiaohongshu.

For Singapore brands, Golden Week isn’t just a tourism event — it’s a revenue catalyst. Hotels, airlines, attraction operators, F&B businesses, and luxury retailers all have a direct stake in being discoverable at the exact moment Chinese consumers are researching their trips. The brands that invest in Xiaohongshu presence before the holiday window open are the ones that fill their bookings first.

Why Xiaohongshu Is the Go-To Platform for Chinese Travel Planning

To understand Xiaohongshu’s role in travel planning, it helps to think of it as a hybrid between Pinterest, TripAdvisor, and Instagram — but built entirely around community trust. Users post detailed “notes” (笔记) combining photos or short videos with rich written descriptions covering everything from restaurant recommendations to transport hacks to hotel room reviews. Unlike Western platforms where influencer content can feel polished to the point of feeling fake, Xiaohongshu’s culture prizes authenticity and genuine experience-sharing.

This trust dynamic makes Xiaohongshu uniquely powerful for travel. When a Chinese user searches “新加坡必去” (Singapore must-visit) or “国庆假期新加坡攻略” (Golden Week Singapore itinerary), they’re served a rich feed of peer-authored content that feels far more credible than a hotel’s official website or a paid advertisement. Purchase and booking decisions are heavily influenced by this kind of social proof, which means brands that generate strong organic and KOL-driven content on the platform gain a measurable competitive advantage.

The platform’s search functionality is particularly significant. Xiaohongshu has evolved into a social search engine, with users actively typing destination queries the same way they might use Baidu or Google. This behaviour makes Xiaohongshu content function like SEO — discoverable, indexable, and capable of generating sustained reach long after a post goes live. For Singapore tourism brands, this means a well-crafted Xiaohongshu note created in September can still be surfacing in travel searches come October’s Golden Week rush.

The Singapore Opportunity: What Chinese Tourists Are Searching For

Understanding search behaviour on Xiaohongshu is the foundation of any effective Golden Week strategy. Chinese travellers planning a Singapore trip tend to cluster their searches around a few consistent themes: food trails (especially hawker centres and local cuisine), shopping districts and duty-free experiences, family-friendly attractions like Universal Studios Singapore and Gardens by the Bay, and “hidden gem” experiences that feel exclusive rather than touristy.

Beyond the obvious landmarks, there’s growing appetite for neighbourhood exploration content — think Tiong Bahru’s café culture, Kampong Glam’s streetwear scene, or Little India’s visual richness. These hyper-local experiences generate strong engagement on Xiaohongshu because they give travellers content they can’t find in a traditional travel brochure. Singapore brands that can authentically tell these neighbourhood stories have a real content advantage.

Price transparency is also a notable feature of Xiaohongshu travel content. Chinese users frequently include price breakdowns, budget comparisons, and booking tips in their posts. Singapore’s reputation as a premium destination means brands should lean into value-articulation — helping potential visitors understand what they get for their spend rather than hiding behind aspirational imagery alone. Content that combines beautiful visuals with practical financial information consistently outperforms purely aesthetic posts on the platform.

Building a Winning Xiaohongshu Content Strategy for Golden Week

A strong Xiaohongshu strategy for Golden Week begins at least six to eight weeks before the holiday, giving content time to index, accumulate engagement, and surface organically in the platform’s recommendation algorithm. The content mix should balance three distinct post types: inspirational content that creates destination desire, informational content that answers planning questions, and transactional content that drives direct booking or purchase action.

Crafting Notes That Rank and Convert

On Xiaohongshu, the “note” format is everything. High-performing travel notes typically feature a striking cover image (vertical format, with text overlay in Chinese), a compelling first line that reads like a headline, and a structured body that uses emojis and line breaks to aid scannability. Keywords should be embedded naturally in the title and caption — terms like 新加坡旅游攻略 (Singapore travel guide), 国庆节出行 (National Day travel), and 东南亚旅游 (Southeast Asia travel) carry strong seasonal search volume heading into Golden Week.

For Singapore brands specifically, localised Chinese-language content dramatically outperforms translated English material. The tone should feel like advice from a knowledgeable friend rather than a marketing brochure. This is where working with native Mandarin content creators or a specialist Xiaohongshu marketing agency becomes genuinely valuable — the nuance of tone, cultural references, and colloquial phrasing are difficult to replicate without deep platform familiarity.

Video vs. Image Notes: Choosing Your Format

Xiaohongshu supports both image-based notes (多图笔记) and short video notes (视频笔记), and both formats have a role in a Golden Week campaign. Image carousels work well for itinerary posts, restaurant round-ups, and neighbourhood guides — formats where users want to swipe through curated information at their own pace. Short videos (typically 15 to 60 seconds) are better suited to immersive destination storytelling, behind-the-scenes hotel tours, or sensory-rich food experiences. A well-balanced content calendar will deploy both formats depending on the specific goal of each post.

Leveraging KOLs and UGC to Amplify Your Reach

Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) on Xiaohongshu operate very differently from Instagram influencers. The platform’s community tends to favour KOCs (Key Opinion Consumers) — micro-influencers with smaller but highly engaged followings whose content feels genuinely personal rather than commercially produced. For Golden Week campaigns, a blended approach works best: a small number of higher-tier KOLs for broad awareness, supported by a larger pool of KOCs whose authentic experiences generate the social proof that drives conversion.

Identifying the right KOLs requires more than follower count analysis. Engagement rate, content niche alignment, geographic follower distribution, and posting frequency all matter. Tools like StarScout AI, Hashmeta’s AI-powered influencer discovery platform, allow brands to filter potential partners by these dimensions quickly and accurately — removing the guesswork that typically makes influencer selection slow and expensive. For Singapore tourism campaigns, prioritising KOLs whose audience base is concentrated in Tier 1 and Tier 2 Chinese cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Hangzhou) tends to yield the highest-quality inbound traffic.

User-generated content (UGC) is the organic amplifier that can extend a campaign’s reach well beyond its paid components. Encouraging actual Chinese visitors to post their Singapore experiences on Xiaohongshu — through branded hashtags, photo spots, or in-venue prompts — creates a self-sustaining content engine that continues generating impressions long after Golden Week ends. The best Singapore tourism brands think about UGC not as a bonus but as a core part of their platform strategy.

Timing Your Campaign: The Golden Week Content Calendar

The window for Golden Week Xiaohongshu marketing can be broken into three distinct phases, each with different content objectives. Getting this phasing right is the difference between a campaign that builds momentum and one that arrives too late to matter.

Phase 1: Inspiration (8-6 weeks before Golden Week). This is when Chinese travellers begin browsing destination options without having committed to a specific location. Content in this phase should be aspirational and broad — showcasing Singapore’s highlights, unique experiences, and seasonal appeal. The goal is to get Singapore onto the traveller’s shortlist.

Phase 2: Planning (5-3 weeks before Golden Week). Decision-making accelerates here. Travellers are actively comparing destinations, researching itineraries, and reading detailed notes about logistics, costs, and must-do experiences. This is where informational content — practical guides, hotel comparisons, F&B round-ups — earns the highest engagement. KOL partnerships should be activated heavily in this phase to flood the platform with credible Singapore content.

Phase 3: Conversion (2 weeks before and during Golden Week). By this point, most trips are booked. Content in this phase should focus on maximising in-destination spend — promoting specific experiences, limited-time offers, or on-the-ground recommendations for travellers already in Singapore. UGC from early Golden Week arrivals can be reshared to inspire latecomers and maintain platform momentum.

Measuring Success: What Metrics Actually Matter

Xiaohongshu marketing is sometimes dismissed as difficult to measure, but that’s largely a result of looking at the wrong metrics. Vanity figures like raw impressions tell you very little about campaign effectiveness. The metrics that matter for a Golden Week inbound tourism campaign are more specific: search ranking for target keywords (e.g., how prominently does “新加坡攻略” surface your brand’s content?), save rate on notes (saves indicate genuine planning intent, not just passive scrolling), comment sentiment and quality, and ultimately, correlation with booking or inquiry volume from Chinese source markets.

Brands serious about performance measurement should also be tracking cross-platform signals. Traffic from Chinese IP addresses to a brand’s official website, WeChat enquiry volume, and China-market OTA (online travel agency) booking trends during and after the campaign window all provide triangulating data that helps establish Xiaohongshu’s contribution to the overall Golden Week result. A data-driven approach to content marketing is what separates campaigns that generate genuine ROI from those that produce impressive-looking screenshots without commercial impact.

How Hashmeta Helps Singapore Brands Win on Xiaohongshu

Executing a high-performance Golden Week campaign on Xiaohongshu requires a specific combination of platform expertise, Chinese-language content capability, KOL network access, and performance analytics — all coordinated against a tight seasonal deadline. For most Singapore tourism and hospitality brands, building this capability in-house is neither practical nor cost-effective. This is where a specialist partner makes a measurable difference.

Hashmeta is one of Asia’s fastest-growing performance-based digital marketing agencies, with dedicated Xiaohongshu marketing expertise and operations in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China. The agency’s proprietary AI influencer discovery platform accelerates KOL identification and vetting, while its in-house team of over 50 specialists handles everything from Chinese-language content creation and community management to campaign analytics and reporting. Hashmeta’s broader capability set — spanning influencer marketing, content marketing, and AI-powered marketing solutions — means Singapore brands get a fully integrated approach rather than fragmented point solutions.

Whether you’re a hotel group looking to fill Golden Week room nights, a retail brand targeting Chinese high-spend shoppers, or an attraction operator wanting to diversify your visitor source markets, Hashmeta has the regional relationships and platform knowledge to turn Xiaohongshu into a measurable growth channel before the next Golden Week window opens.

Final Thoughts

China’s Golden Week is not a passive opportunity — it’s a competitive one. The brands that win inbound Chinese travel to Singapore are the ones that show up on Xiaohongshu early, speak the language of the platform authentically, and pair compelling content with smart KOL partnerships and disciplined performance measurement. Waiting until the holiday is two weeks away is waiting too long.

The good news is that Xiaohongshu rewards consistency and quality over brute-force spending. A well-planned campaign built on genuine cultural understanding and data-driven content decisions can deliver outsized results — even for brands that are just entering the platform. The key is to start now, build the right content infrastructure, and be present in every phase of the Chinese traveller’s decision journey, from inspiration right through to arrival.