On December 19, 2025, the China International Travel Mart officially opened at the Hainan International Convention and Exhibition Center. At the Cultural and Tourism Innovation Launch Event of the conference, China UnionPay officially launched the "Nihao China" app. This app aims to provide overseas visitors to China with one-stop digital services covering multiple scenarios such as payment, travel, daily life, and cultural tourism. Through a convenient, intelligent, and user-friendly full-cycle experience in China, it helps improve the level of facilitation for inbound tourism and actively serves the country's new pattern of opening up to the outside world.
Integrating core functions to build a convenient "payment + travel" ecosystem
The "Nihao China" app focuses on payment and travel, deeply integrating multiple practical functions. For payments, the app supports top-ups for UnionPay foreign cards and major international bank cards such as Visa and Mastercard, supporting diversified payment methods for online and offline consumption scenarios, covering various high-frequency consumption scenarios such as transportation, accommodation, and shopping, allowing inbound tourists to seamlessly experience convenient QR code payments. For travel, the app's travel services cover subways in 43 major cities across China and public transportation in 1760 cities at the county level and above, achieving "one code for all" and providing convenient navigation to nearby ATMs, foreign exchange points, and other facilities, improving travel convenience. Regarding exchange rates for cross-currency payments, the app can obtain real-time global currency exchange rates, supporting conversions of over 160 currencies including USD, RMB, and EUR.
Leveraging platform advantages and collaborating with multiple parties to address frequent pain points in inbound travel
As the organizer of the "Nihao China" APP, China UnionPay fully leverages its platform advantages to provide a service platform for multiple partners, forming a collaborative force to jointly promote the high-quality development of cultural and tourism services. In terms of payment, the APP relies on the integrated acceptance network of UnionPay, WeChat Pay, and Alipay within China to achieve broader payment coverage. For online payments, the APP supports payments from over 300 applications, including 12306, Ctrip, Meituan, and JD.com, completing the payment loop for each partner in cultural and tourism services. The departure tax refund service has covered key cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Haikou, and Sanya, supporting OCR recognition, QR code interaction, and a fully English interface, achieving efficient and fast tax refunds.
Technology empowers cultural and tourism services to enhance depth and warmth.
As a platform app offering diverse services, "Nihao China" features built-in real-time and page translation tools, supporting multilingual conversational and text translation functions to effectively eliminate language barriers. Furthermore, it supports intelligent querying of all app functions, provides one-click entry guidance, and offers recommended next steps based on overseas travelers' personal information and usage habits. It accurately understands and answers overseas travelers' questions about attraction introductions, transportation guides, and restaurant recommendations, and provides navigation services to precisely plan routes, helping tourists quickly obtain the information they need and enhancing their travel experience.
In addition, UnionPay's booth made its debut at this year's China International Travel Mart, providing detailed introductions to the "Nihao China" APP and offering on-site demonstrations. UnionPay's business achievements related to the cultural and tourism industry, such as the "Splendid China Card," "Departure Tax Refund," and "Cross-border Payment Solutions," were also showcased.
The launch of the "Nihao China" app represents a significant innovation by China UnionPay in the field of cross-border digital services, and is also a major initiative to actively respond to the national call for improving the facilitation of inbound tourism and promoting high-quality development of the cultural and tourism industry. Through technological empowerment and ecosystem integration, this application not only builds an efficient and convenient digital service ecosystem in China, but also vividly demonstrates China's positive stance on deepening opening-up and promoting cultural exchanges. In the future, China UnionPay will continue to optimize product functions, expand its domestic and international cooperation ecosystem, and work with global partners to jointly build a smarter, more interconnected, and more user-friendly cross-border lifestyle service network, continuously contributing financial technology to promoting tourism cooperation and cultural exchanges between China and other countries.
