What we check, and what we won't do
TravelerLocal.ai is an English-language reference for the administrative side of travelling in mainland China as a foreigner: which attractions require an advance real-name reservation tied to your passport, when their tickets are released, whether a foreign passport is accepted, which hotels can register foreign guests, how foreign cards attach to Alipay and WeChat Pay, and who qualifies for visa-free entry or 240-hour transit. It covers 222 destinations and 888 attractions, publishes 52 long-form guides, and shows the date each record was last checked. It sells nothing and links to no ticket resellers.
The problem this exists for
Most travel writing about China describes places. The thing that actually derails a trip is administrative: the museum that sold out seven days ago at 20:00 Beijing time, the hotel that turns you away because it is not licensed to register a foreign guest, the ticket app that will not accept a passport number in the field it wants, the payment that fails at the counter. These rules are real, they change, and they are mostly documented in Chinese. That is the gap this site works in.
What is actually here
- 222
- destination guides, all of them above the editorial gate
- 888
- attraction records, of which 386 require advance real-name booking
- 759
- attractions with a full booking-rules page of their own
- 52
- long-form guides on visas, transit, payments, rail, permits and the rest
- 27
- province hubs grouping the destinations by where they are
- 117
- dishes with the Chinese name in characters you can show a waiter
How a fact gets onto a page
- 1. Sourced. Booking rules come from the operator's own channel where one exists; policy claims come from the issuing authority (National Immigration Administration, the State Council, embassies, the People's Bank of China) and are linked and dated in the text.
- 2. Dated. Every city and attraction record carries the date it was last checked, shown on the page. A fact with no date is a fact you cannot act on.
- 3. Left blank when unknown. Prices we could not confirm stay empty. Attractions whose reservation rule we could not establish are marked unknown rather than assumed. Two open datasets below publish those gaps rather than hiding them.
- 4. Corrected. Every city page has a “spotted something out of date?” box. Corrections go to a human.
One honest limitation: most records were compiled from published sources and cross-checked, not by someone standing at the gate. Records say which method was used. We do not claim a network of local contributors we do not have.
What we refuse to do
- No reseller links. Official channels only. Where the official channel is a Chinese-only mini-program with no web page, we say so instead of substituting a reseller.
- No sponsored placements. Nothing on this site is listed because someone paid for it.
- No invented numbers. Unverifiable prices, dates and capacities are left out.
Open data and machine access
Two datasets are published in full, gaps included, free to cite with attribution: the attraction booking-rules dataset and the official booking-site reachability test. The same verified records are queryable as JSON at /api/facts, and as an MCP server at /api/mcp, listed in the official Model Context Protocol registry.
Contact
Corrections and questions: support@travelerlocal.ai. Privacy: privacy@travelerlocal.ai (and the privacy policy). The editorial stance behind all of this is on the honest layer.