Yilin Watch: The Xiaohongshu Report is published in exclusive association with The Moodie Davitt Report
Introduction: Yilin Consulting is an acclaimed boutique consultancy based in Paris, specialising in helping travel retail brands and retailers engage the new generation of Chinese outbound travellers.
Its focus lies in converting independent, experience-driven travellers through targeted omnichannel engagement and frontline cultural training.
Today, as part of our unrivalled coverage of the Chinese travel retail market at home and abroad, The Moodie Davitt Report proudly brings you the seventh edition of our exclusive column in partnership with Yilin Consulting Founder Yilin Wang – Yilin Watch: The Xiaohongshu Report.
Prologue: The Joy of Gifting
Chinese New Year is the most significant celebration in the Chinese calendar — for communities in China and across the world. In 2026, over 1.5 billion people marked this moment together: reunion, ritual, and the quiet joy of coming home.
The skies are full. Families cross continents to close the distance. And in Chinese culture, gifting travels with them — not as a gesture, but as a language. A thread connecting generations. A way of saying, across distance and time: I thought of you.
So this edition asks a simple question: In the season where gifting matters most, what do Chinese travellers actually choose to carry home?
We look at three duty-free players across three continents — World Duty Free in the UK, JAL Duty Free at Tokyo Narita International Airport Terminal 2 and Haneda Airport Terminal 3 in Japan, and Vancouver International Airport in Canada.
Three destinations. Three gifting approaches.
Across them, two categories consistently rise to the top: spirits and perfume & cosmetics — surfacing through festive mechanics, lucky draws and red packet activations alike.
Data coverage: 10 February (Little Chinese New Year, Xiao Nian) to 3 March (Lantern Festival) — the full arc of the Year of the Horse celebrations.
Content strategies reveal intent. Audience engagement reveals impact. Across the three accounts, the comments sections tell vastly different stories about what Chinese travellers sought – and found – during the CNY pre-trip planning period.
Our Analytical Framework
We use Yilin Consulting’s analytical framework, LINXY – ‘Link, See, Engage’ – to decode how each player connected with Chinese travellers during the Year of The Horse festive period. Through this lens, we compare and illustrate the Xiaohongshu strategies of three key accounts across every engagement stage.
Real people, real environment, useful knowledge delivered on the shop floor — a deliberate editorial philosophy that made JAL Duty Free the most human account in this edition’s selection, and the most instructive
Link: The Content Landscape
During the Year of the Horse festive window, three travel retail players showed up on Xiaohongshu with markedly different rhythms – not just in volume, but in strategic intent.
World Duty Free published 12 CNY posts anchored by a clear category bet. Seven were dedicated to spirits category — led by whisky — positioning World of Whiskies at Heathrow Airport as a must-visit, immersive gifting destination, with choices for both the gifting explorer and the premium collector.
The other five posts set the stage for CNY promotion, with mechanics layered seamlessly on top: a CNY red packet coupon, an eleven-day lucky draw as a Xiaohongshu SEC campaign, and a Reserve & Collect pre-order Mini Program.
The result is a coherent, frictionless pre-trip shopping environment — designed for Chinese travellers already planning what to bring home.
JAL Duty Free published five CNY posts across Narita and Haneda airports with a strong focus on the beauty category. The account’s editorial DNA is unmistakable: Beauty Advisors (BAs) filmed directly in-store, speaking to camera with warmth and expertise.
Video posts showing BAs presenting gifting options and sharing practical beauty tips consistently
outperformed promotional content.
Real people, real environment, useful knowledge delivered on the shop floor — a deliberate editorial philosophy that made JAL Duty Free the most human account in this edition’s selection, and the most instructive.
Vancouver International Airport published eight posts overall, five CNY-themed, leaning into traditional festive aesthetics — red, gold, Year of the Horse gifting sets, lion dance footage — grounded in the cultural world of its significant overseas Chinese community.
No promotional mechanics, while gifting choice paying tribute to the destination. One breakout video carried the weight: a Chinese store associate presenting Canadian Icewine as the perfect take-home gift for family reunion. One face. One category. And a remarkably active comment section.
Three accounts. Three destinations. Three distinct bets on what Chinese travellers are looking for when they scroll — and when they shop.
See: Decoding Content Strategy
World Duty Free: When British heritage becomes a gifting system
World Duty Free’s CNY content strategy was built around one coherent narrative: British whisky as the ultimate gifting destination. Post after post reinforces the same sense of place — World of Whiskies at Heathrow Airport as a curated shrine where price advantage, travel exclusives and collector rarities converge.
Star Post: ‘An Immersive Journey Through the World of Whiskies at Heathrow’
Click here for the post link
Click here for the video link
The World Duty Free account functions as a pre-trip spirits concierge — building desire and reducing friction simultaneously. Its strength lies in consistency: every post reinforces the same destination narrative.
Engagement remains in discovery mode — audiences are saving, planning and building their whisky wishlists. The conversation layer is the next frontier.
JAL Duty Free: Human-led trust building
JAL Duty Free made one defining editorial choice during CNY — and it paid off decisively.
Rather than investing in festive campaign design or celebrity partnerships, the account put its beauty advisors on camera. In-store. Speaking directly. With real expertise and no distance.
The result speaks for itself: A fragrance category tutorial — teaching Chinese travellers how to wear perfume without it feeling heavy or overpowering — generated nearly 2,000 likes and 914 saves.
In a market where fragrance is still an emerging beauty ritual, content that genuinely helps people use a product better is not just engagement. It is category development — accelerating category adoption beyond a single purchase moment.
Star Post: ‘Perfume Mistakes You’re Making – Unlock That Luxury Feel in 1 minute’
Click here for the post link
Click here for the video link
This reflects a broader shift confirmed by Top 12 China Consumer Trends 2026*: Chinese consumers are not buying less — they are buying better. They invest in products that demonstrably elevate their daily quality of life.
Fragrance fits this logic precisely. It is an accessible luxury, an emerging daily ritual — life needs a sense of ritual (生活需要仪式感) — and for a population still learning how to wear it, a video that teaches them how is more valuable than any campaign that tells them what to buy.
The signal for brands and retailers is clear. Content that starts from the consumer’s lived experience — not from a brand brief — is what earns trust, saves and repeat visits. JAL Duty Free didn’t just sell perfume. It made perfume worth buying.
*1 Top 12 China Consumer Trends 2026, ChoZan, March 2026
Vancouver International Airport: When a local face makes a local product travel
Vancouver International Airport approached CNY through the lens of its community.
With one of the largest overseas Chinese populations in North America on its doorstep, the account built a festive offer rooted in cultural familiarity — and anchored it with a single product recommendation delivered by a Chinese-speaking sales associate based in Canada.
Star Post: ‘Guide to Buying Icewine at Vancouver Airport’
Click here for the post link
Click here for the video link
{Note: The original video was published without English subtitles. Subtitles have been added by
Yilin Consulting to facilitate understanding for non-Chinese-speaking readers.}
Vancouver International Airport demonstrates that for Chinese travelling communities, cultural familiarity is the most powerful conversion trigger. When the product, the person and the occasion align — the content does the selling.
See: Overall Reflection
Across these three accounts, three distinct gifting content forces emerge.
World Duty Free builds desire through category depth and destination storytelling — turning a spirits aisle into a gifting reference.
JAL Duty Free earns trust through consumer education — turning a BA into a category ambassador.
Vancouver International Airport converts through cultural fluency and value clarity — turning a Chinese BA face into the store’s most powerful commercial asset.
Different formats, categories, and continents — yet a shared discovery: In the CNY gifting window, the content that moves Chinese travellers from scroll to store is rarely the loudest. It is the most useful, the most human, and the most culturally precise.
Engage: Audience Engagement Insights
Content strategies reveal intent. Audience engagement reveals impact. Across the three accounts, the comments sections tell vastly different stories about what Chinese travellers sought – and found – during the CNY pre-trip planning period.
Promotion drives traffic. The comment layer earns trust — and prepares the sale.
World Duty Free: Promotion Drives Traffic, Service Builds Trust
Engagement presents a dual dynamic. The CNY lucky draw SEC campaign acted as the primary traffic engine, generating over 900 combined interactions and strong organic reach during the festive window.
The star post, meanwhile, demonstrated strong save behaviour, signalling high pre-trip purchase intent, with audiences in active planning mode ahead of departure.
At category level, performance is solid. Collector-led spirits content consistently reaches 100+ likes with meaningful saves — a strong benchmark for travel retail on Xiaohongshu — reflecting clear appetite for high-value British whisky and rare expressions.
Cultural cues further amplify engagement: New Year narratives around luck and prosperity resonate strongly, from Penfolds’ auspicious Chinese naming “奔富” (bēn fù, ‘Heading towards prosperity’) to comments framing Hennessy’s VSOP Year of the Horse Edition as a ‘wealth code‘.
What distinguishes the account is the consistency of its community management. Every interaction receives a personalised, festive reply — combining New Year greetings with precise guidance on terminal locations, tastings, customs allowances and product availability.
A user admiring the Benriach 50 Year Old for instance, is directed to Heathrow T4 for a tasting.
The account builds human warmth through its replies — functioning less as a social channel and more as a knowledgeable, attentive concierge for premium spirits purchasing.
Promotion drives traffic. The comment layer earns trust — and prepares the sale.
JAL Duty Free: When a BA teaches, the community builds itself
Engagement is driven by a clear engine: BA-led educational content. The fragrance tutorial stands out, generating nearly 2,000 likes and 914 saves — an exceptional result for travel retail beauty content on Xiaohongshu, achieved without influencers.
The comment section reveals the depth of this performance. Users debate spraying techniques, share personal rituals, and tag friends to learn together — turning a single post into a collective learning space. Content that is genuinely useful activates participation: the audience does not just consume, it contributes.
This dynamic extends across the account. The CNY beauty tutorial, built around a Japanese-inspired festive look, follows with 200+ likes and strong saves. The CNY greeting video goes further: each category is introduced by the BA in charge, creating a one-to-one connection through faces, voices and personality — a level of familiarity that brand-led campaigns rarely replicate.
By contrast, gifting guides and in-store lucky draw posts generate limited interaction — confirming that human-led, user-centric content resonates far more deeply than product-led promotion.
In a destination such as Japan, where seasonal traffic is already strong, this model does more than capture attention. It converts footfall into category confidence — and category confidence into long-term loyalty.
Engagement here does more than interact. It informs, reassures and prepares the purchase before arrival.
Vancouver International Airport: When a familiar face becomes a purchase trigger
Engagement is explicit, practical and decision-driven. The Icewine guide clearly dominates CNY performance, with 214 likes, 146 saves and 37 comments — significantly outperforming all other festive posts.
Gifting guides and atmosphere-led content generated limited interaction, confirming a clear signal: category-specific, BA-led content, anchored in a real travel moment, is what cuts through.
The comment section functions as a live pre-trip planning space. Users ask concrete questions — transit rules, carry allowances, legal drinking age (19 in British Columbia, clearly communicated), promotion timing, and product formats — all answered with precision by the airport team.
Benson is recognised by name across multiple comments, greeted as a familiar face rather than a store associate. In this context, trust is not built by the brand, but carried by the person.
One industry-wide friction surfaces clearly. Several users question whether duty-free Icewine is genuinely more competitive than downtown retail (three comments attracting 14 likes) — a concern that receives visible endorsement.
The absence of response here is understandable, yet revealing: value perception remains a live tension for the travel retail channel.
What the data also confirms is agility. The success of this format is immediately replicated, with a follow-up Icewine video posted on 22 March — the day of publication — already generating early engagement within 24 hours.
Engagement here does more than interact. It informs, reassures and prepares the purchase before arrival.
The Yilin Takeaway
1. The gifting window is won before departure — not at the counter
Across all three accounts, the highest-performing content reached Chinese travellers weeks before they flew. Spirits wishlists built at Heathrow. Fragrance rituals learned at Narita. Icewine gift sets shortlisted at Vancouver.
The pre-trip planning window is not awareness — it is intent. Brands and retailers that show up early, with the right category message, arrive at the counter with a warmer, more prepared customer.
2. The BA is your most powerful content asset
JAL Duty Free and Vancouver Airport demonstrate this clearly: a culturally fluent associate on camera — teaching, recommending, explaining — consistently outperforms branded campaigns, promotional posts, and curated displays. No heavy production. No costly influencer budget. Just the right person, telling the right story, making the duty-free shopping journey fluid and pleasant.
3. Digital builds intent. The floor conversation closes it
Chinese travellers arrive already decided. They have saved the post, compared the price and identified the product. What happens in the first conversation at the counter either confirms that intent — or loses the sale. The real gap in travel retail is not digital presence. It is human readiness on the shop floor.
Conclusion
In the Year of the Horse, speed matters. But direction matters more.
CNY 2026 rewarded accounts that invested in human presence, category specificity and community responsiveness. The most-saved post in this edition was not the most promoted. It was the most useful — and the most human.
The next battleground is not the scroll. It is the shop floor. Chinese travellers arrive with high intent and high expectations. The first culturally fluent conversation at the counter is where digital investment either pays off — or doesn’t.
Are your frontline teams ready for that conversation?
[At Yilin Consulting, we design practical frontline programmes for premium brands — equipping Brand Ambassadors with the cultural confidence and conversation tools to convert Chinese visitors from the very first interaction.]
Contact: yilinwang@yilinconsulting.com
Previously on Yilin Watch: The Xiaohongshu Report
Edition 5: Yilin Watch: The Xiaohongshu Report – Targeting the year-end Chinese traveller
Edition 2: Yilin Watch: The Xiaohongshu Report – Focus on Qatar Airways, Cathay Pacific and All Nippon Airways
Edition 1: Announcing a key new editorial column – Yilin Watch: The Xiaohongshu Report
