Why Malaysia’s tourism boom lives and dies on a Chinese app

Stand on the pedestrian crossing outside McDonald’s in Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur, and you will understand something about how travel works in the 21st century.To the office workers and taxi drivers streaming past, it is just another junction in Malaysia’s biggest city. Yet Chinese tourists will often stop at the side of the intersection, phones raised, capturing a sight only RedNote taught them to see.This is the new geography of Malaysian tourism: shaped less by guidebooks or travel agents than by a Chinese lifestyle app handling 600 million searches every single day.A woman holds her smartphone displaying the Chinese social networking and e-commerce app RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu. Photo: AFPRedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu in Mandarin, has become the default itinerary planner for a generation of outbound Chinese travellers.Last year, the platform logged 130 million monthly active outbound travel users, with more than nine in 10 of them actively searching for travel content.Malaysia, with its colourful mosques, Mandarin-speaking locals, durian stalls and photogenic roti tisu (crispy, crepe-like flatbread) has proved ideal fodder for the feed.‘Authentic, trustworthy’What makes RedNote so potent is its ease of use and massive user base, according to Sienna Parulis-Cook of China-focused marketing consultancy Dragon Trail International.