Chinese & Japanese social media · Hotels, restaurants, museums, attractions
I write and run Chinese and Japanese accounts for European businesses that people travel to — built around how each market actually searches, rather than translated from your English.
Most European businesses have one story, written in English, adapted outward. That works between English, Dutch and German, where the reader's frame of reference is broadly shared. It stops working the moment the market changes.
RED functions as a search engine, not a social feed. Chinese travellers plan trips by searching it the way you would search Google. A restaurant, museum or hotel with no presence there does not rank badly — it returns nothing, and is never considered.
Japanese audiences arrive through entirely different doors. Architecture, craft, provenance and history carry real weight there, with informed readerships behind them. The detail that converts a Japanese visitor is frequently the one an English page treats as a footnote.
So the same building, the same kitchen, the same collection needs a different lead in each market — not a different language for the same lead. That is the whole job.
The approach
A five-storey subtropical garden inside an energy-neutral timber hotel, on the pier where steamships once left Amsterdam for the Dutch East Indies. Two strong hooks — and they do not travel to the same audience.
hoteljakarta A tropical garden in the heart of Amsterdam. Discover our five-storey indoor garden, 200 rooms with private balconies, a pool and sauna, and a rooftop bar overlooking the water. Sustainable, stylish and perfectly located.
Accurate, fluent and completely interchangeable. Every claim in it — stylish, sustainable, perfectly located — is made by two hundred other hotels in the same city.
Translated into Chinese or Japanese it stays interchangeable, just in another language. Nothing in it gives either market a reason to choose this hotel over the one next door.
在荷兰住进一片热带雨林，是这趟最没想到的一件事
酒店在阿姆斯特丹 Java 岛最东端。一百年前，从这里出发的蒸汽船开往雅加达。
一进门就是五层高的室内热带花园，29 种亚热带植物，最高的棕榈顶到玻璃天窗。花园里有一条架空步道，下午四五点光斜进来的时候，是全酒店最出片的机位。
The selling point is not the tropics — it is that the tropics are in the wrong country. Chinese travellers expect the Netherlands to be cold and grey, so the contradiction is the hook.
The post then does what RED is actually used for: naming the spot and the hour to photograph it. Search behaviour, not browsing behaviour.
アムステルダムの東、ヤワ島の突端。
100年前、ここからジャカルタ行きの船が出ていました。
館内に入ると、5階分の吹き抜けを埋める亜熱帯の森。植物と樹木29種、天窓まで届くヤシ。
建物の9割が木造で、エネルギーは自給。
Palm trees are not a reason for a Japanese traveller to fly to the Netherlands. Timber construction and energy-neutral building are — Japan has a large, informed readership for both, and that audience will read a thread to the end.
So the shipping route opens it and the engineering carries it. The garden becomes the setting rather than the subject.
Concept work, produced unsolicited. Not commissioned by or affiliated with the property.
Who it's for
Different businesses, one shared problem: the asset is physical, the visitor is foreign, and the gap between them is a language nobody on the team reads.
Direct bookings leak to the OTAs because the OTA is localised and your own site is not. Content, listing copy and the market logic behind both.
Chinese and Japanese visitors decide where to eat before they land, on platforms that hold no record of you. Menu framing, dish naming and the story a local guest never needs told.
The most exportable asset in Europe and the least translated. What a collection means to a Japanese reader is rarely what the English wall text emphasises.
Craft, provenance and process convert powerfully in both markets — and are usually buried on an About page written for domestic customers.
Selected work
A concept portfolio built to show reasoning rather than output. Select a platform to see the post, and the argument behind it.
Colonial shipping history for one market, energy-neutral timber engineering for the other.
A Japanese-owned hotel whose Japanese identity is its strongest asset in China and its weakest in Japan.
The kitchen decides the booking in one market; the square-metre count decides it in the other.
A 1922 church turned hotel. One market reads it as a photograph; the other reads it as architecture.
Select RED or X above to preview a post.
How it works
Nobody should sign a year of content for a market they cannot read. So the first commitment is deliberately small and ends in a decision.
What your assets are actually worth in each market, which platform matters, and what your competitors have already occupied. Delivered as a written argument you can act on with or without me.
1 week · fixed fee
One platform, one language, agreed cadence. Metrics fixed in advance — saves, search visibility, referral traffic, enquiries — so the outcome is not a matter of opinion.
3 months · monthly fee
What moved, what didn't, and my honest read on whether this market is worth your budget. If it isn't, I will say so.
End of month three
Extend to a second market, keep running, or take it in-house — including documentation and training for whoever inherits it.
Your call
Pricing
Fixed fees, no retainer minimums, no markup on media buying. Excluding VAT.
A written assessment. Useful on its own.
€850 one-off
One market, one platform, three months, agreed metrics.
€750 / month
Chinese and Japanese, running in parallel.
€1,400 / month
Photography and paid promotion are billed at cost, if used at all. Most of this work needs neither.
Who I am
I spent over two years managing up to 180 Airbnb and Booking.com listings remotely for European operators — pricing, distribution, listing optimisation and guest communication in three languages. On eight properties I took occupancy from under 20% to over 80%.
That order matters. I came to content through revenue rather than through design, so I am used to being measured on occupancy and conversion rather than on engagement. I studied product design, then Japanese in Tokyo, and I run a small cross-border sourcing business alongside this.
Contact
The most useful first message names the property and the market you're curious about. I'll reply with a straight read on whether it's worth your budget — including when the answer is that it isn't.