Two new reports sketch the scale of China's inbound boom, Shenzhen News reports.
Official statistics. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2025 statistical bulletin: 35.17 million foreign arrivals in 2025, up 30.6% year on year; total inbound visitors including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan residents reached 154.5 million, up 17.1%. Foreign arrivals grew much faster than the 13.7% growth of HK/Macao/Taiwan residents' trips — remote foreign demand is now the main incremental engine.
Platform analysis. Ctrip's Annual Report on China's Inbound Tourism 2026 argues visa-free policy is the core dividend: nearly 80 countries now enjoy visa-free entry, and visa-free-country visitor growth of 50% far outpaces visa-required markets. Source-market highlights: Thailand +100%, Malaysia rising to the No.3 source country, the UK +36%, and Middle Eastern visitors doubling with high spending power. The report proposes a four-quadrant strategy — golden core markets (Thailand, Malaysia), base markets (Europe/US), potential tracks (Spain, Vietnam) and reserve markets (India) — and stresses that standardized products no longer suffice: fine-grained segmentation is now mandatory.
Service gaps remain the bottleneck. Pain points cluster around pre-trip information, payments, language and transport. Ctrip's response: "Hi China" pre-trip content, multi-currency payment support, custom products up ~400% YoY in Q1 2026, and multilingual ticketing machines covering 16 languages across 290+ major scenic areas.
Source: "外国游客入境增超三成 中国入境游迈向万亿级市场", Shenzhen News Network, June 12, 2026. Translated and condensed from Chinese; all data as reported by the source.