For years, the tourism relationship between Thailand and China has run one way. Chinese visitors come here, in large numbers, and Thailand builds infrastructure, campaigns and entire hospitality ecosystems around receiving them. 

With the introduction of visa exemption the countries since March 2024, the tide has changed and China is now the top overseas destination for Thai travellers, according to Trip.com data for 2025. 

Adding to the visa exemption are the expanded air routes and competitive package pricing. With payments and language apps making it easier to travel, independent Thai travellers no longer see any barriers when visiting China.

Chongqing is the most researched destination with page views for the city up by 395% year-on-year and bookings up by 828%. The city is known for its spicy cuisine, which closely resembles Thai flavours and its hillside topography and neon-dense urban landscape photograph in a way that translates immediately on social media.

Thai travellers are not arriving there using guidebooks or tourism board campaigns but through social media feeds and Chinese cities, with their visual density and scale, are well-suited to that discovery channel. In 2025, 45% of Thai travellers reported finding trip ideas through Thai KOL social media posts, up from 28% the previous year, with direct bookings via KOL promotion codes up 120%.

Choosing a destination partly because the cuisine feels adjacent to your own is a different kind of travel motivation from ticking off landmarks or chasing a cheap yen. It suggests Thai travellers approaching China not as a historically distant civilisation to be observed but as a neighbouring culture, with the cuisines being a major draw.

Chengdu sits in the same logic: fiercely local, food-obsessed, a city whose identity is built around the table rather than a monument.

The social media infrastructure around Chinese travel has also developed in a way that serves Thai audiences specifically. Chinese platforms like Xiaohongshu have large Thai-language communities sharing itineraries, restaurant recommendations and transport guides, which means the trip-planning ecosystem for a Thai traveller heading to Chongqing is now roughly as developed as it is for one heading to Tokyo. 

The traveller profile driving this is worth noting, too. Thai AirAsia’s CEO described Thais as increasingly open to China across different travel lifestyles, with interest extending well beyond the three or four headline cities into destinations that would not have registered for most Thai travellers five years ago.

The broadening of the mental map is a generational shift as much as a logistical one, driven by a younger cohort that plans trips through apps, books independently and is less anchored to the destinations their parents defaulted to.