Young travelers drive surge in cultural tourism

The China Tourism Academy and tourism platform Mafengwo recently jointly released a report about China's cultural specialties, which were categorized into five areas, festival customs, intangible cultural heritage, local cuisine, folk art and cultural intellectual properties.

Currently, young people's travel preferences are shifting from sightseeing to in-depth experiences, longing to delve into the culture, history and lifestyle of their destinations and gain emotional resonance through travel.

Data from Mafengwo showed that the popularity of intangible cultural heritage and folk customs has been on a steady rise. In the first half of 2025, the volume of the platform's content generated by users about intangible cultural heritage reached 145.7 percent of the total for 2024. Besides that, young travelers like to conduct research about authentic cuisine and folk handicrafts before traveling.

The report showed that 36.6 percent of those who travel for the cultural experiences of destinations are from the post-1990 generation, and 16.2 percent are from the post-2000 generation.

While the post-1990 travelers like to follow online trends to search for cultural experiences, the post-2000 generation is more interested in learning about history and participating in folk customs or intangible cultural heritage activities.

Mafengwo's artificial intelligence travel assistant provides tailor-made recommendations for cultural experiences for tourists. The AI assistant can also offer forecasts of future trends to help destinations identify the potential popularity of experiences earlier, as well as optimize travel experiences.