反向旅游fǎn xiàng lǚ yóu

On the National Day and May Day holidays, the famous sights in China fill up. 反向旅游 is the opposite plan: you pick a town that few tourists visit, where hotels are cheaper and you do not queue.

It is also the opposite of 特种兵旅游, “special-forces travel”, a trip that packs as many sights as possible into a few days.

It is now an ordinary travel word, used before every long holiday. A 2025 round-up of buzzwords on Digitaling listed 反向旅游2.0: not only going somewhere quiet, but looking for what a small town has of its own.

Jiemian reported in October 2022 that during that year’s National Day holiday, many young people posted trips to little-known places on social media, and that the posts set off a wave of 反向旅游. The booking site Qunar said high-end hotel bookings in cities such as Shizuishan in Ningxia and Suining in Sichuan rose more than tenfold on the year before.

The word came back the next year. In October 2023, 36Kr wrote about young people who skipped the crowds of the big cities for places such as Daocheng in Sichuan and the Shengsi islands in Zhejiang.