“Nihao China” App Enhances Convenience in Tourism
On December 19th, at the Cultural Tourism Innovation Launch event at the Hainan International Convention and Exhibition Center, China UnionPay launched the “Nihao China” app. The Nihao China app aims to provide foreign visitors to China with one-stop digital services covering multiple scenarios, including payment, travel, daily life, and cultural tourism. Through a convenient, smart, and user-friendly full-cycle experience in China, it will help enhance the convenience of incoming tourism and actively serve the country’s model of opening up to the outside world.
A Convenient “Payment & Travel” Ecosystem
The “Nihao China” app focuses on payment and travel, integrating many practical functions in depth. In terms of payment, the app supports loading with major international bank cards such as UnionPay, Visa, and Mastercard. Supporting diversified payment methods for online and offline usage scenarios, the app covers various high-frequency consumption scenarios such as transportation, accommodation, and shopping, allowing incoming tourists to experience payments seamlessly using QR codes. The app will also provide convenience in terms of travel. It will provide “one-code access” to metros in 43 major cities and buses in 1,760 cities across China. Furthermore, the app enhances travel convenience by providing easy navigation to nearby ATMs, currency exchange offices, and other facilities. Regarding currency exchange issues, the app obtains global exchange rates in real-time and supports conversion of over 160 currencies, including USD, RMB, and EUR.
Solving Common Problems in Tourism by Collaborating with Multiple Parties
As the organizer of the “Nihao China” app, China UnionPay fully leverages platform advantages to offer service platforms to multiple partners and builds a collaborative force to jointly promote the high-quality development of cultural and tourism services. In terms of payments, the app relies on the integrated acceptance network of UnionPay, WeChat Pay, and Alipay within China to provide broader payment coverage. For online payments, the app supports over 300 apps such as 12306, Ctrip, Meituan, and JD.com, completing the payment cycle for each partner in cultural and tourism services. The exit tax refund service has been expanded to major cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Haikou, and Sanya, supporting OCR recognition, QR code interaction, and a fully English interface for efficient and fast tax refunds.
Technology Adds Depth to Tourism Services
“Nihao China,” a platform application offering a variety of services, effectively eliminates language barriers by integrating real-time and page translation tools, supporting multilingual speech and text translation functions. It also supports intelligent querying of all application functions, provides one-click access guidance, and offers next-step suggestions based on the personal information and usage habits of overseas travelers. It accurately understands and answers overseas travelers’ questions about tourist attractions, transportation guides, and food recommendations, and provides navigation services to help them plan routes accurately, helping tourists quickly access the information they need and enhance their travel experience.
The launch of the “Nihao China” application represents a significant innovation in the field of cross-border digital services for China UnionPay and is a crucial initiative taken in response to China’s national policy of facilitating tourism and promoting the high-quality development of the culture and tourism sector. Through technological empowerment and ecosystem integration, the application not only creates an efficient and convenient digital service ecosystem in China, but also clearly demonstrates China’s positive stance on deepening opening up and promoting cultural exchange. In the future, China UnionPay will continue to optimize product functionalities, expand its local and international cooperation ecosystem, and build a smarter, more connected, and user-friendly cross-border lifestyle service network with global partners, and will continuously contribute to financial technology to promote tourism cooperation and cultural exchange between China and other countries.
News: Xinhua
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