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China's 2026 smart-tourism ticketing stack for ecological scenic areas, theme parks, and cultural-heritage parks is not a single platform but a layered ecosystem assembled from OTAs that move the tickets, cloud and large-model providers that power the language layer, digital-human studios that render the avatars, mapping platforms that supply the spatial intelligence, scenic-area and theme-park operators that deploy the product on the ground, and a thin but consequential policy-and-standards tier led by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and CAICT. The reference policy anchor is the Smart Tourism Innovation Development Action Plan jointly issued on 6 May 2024 by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism with the Cyberspace Administration, NDRC, MIIT, and the National Data Administration, which targets 2027 for a mature smart-tourism infrastructure and explicitly lists digital avatars, VR/AR/MR immersive spaces, smart ticketing gates, and AI interpretation as building blocks. Below is the fact-checked and expanded roster. Named avatars such as Jiayao at Dunhuang, Aiwenwen and Tongguin at the National Museum, Hangxiaoyi in Hangzhou, Tangxiaobao at Xi'an Tang Paradise, and AI-Youxijiang in Guizhou now sit at the core of the ecosystem, each backed by a specific vendor and a specific ticketing integration.
Alphabetical roster of verified participants:
Alibaba Cloud Tongyi (阿里云通义) supplies the core large-model family that underpins digital-human reasoning and trip-planning agents across the Alibaba ecosystem, including the model cluster that Amap and Fliggy jointly use for their 2025 generation AI agents, and its Tongyi Qianwen models are referenced in deployments that feed scenic-area conversational guides and ticketing copilots.
Alipay (支付宝), operated by Ant Group, co-built China's first full-journey AI tour companion with Huangshan Scenic Area announced on 5 September 2024 at the Inclusion·Bund Summit, running on Ant's Bailing large model inside the Zhixiaobao assistant app and providing location-aware guidance, ticket purchase, and personalised trip summaries, and subsequently extended the pattern to the Hangxiaoyi city agent covering more than 40,000 Hangzhou service points activated through NFC "touch" tags.
Amap (高德地图), an Alibaba subsidiary, launched Amap 2025 on 4 August 2025 as a map-native AI agent branded Xiaogao Laoshi that layers pre-trip, in-trip, and post-trip services on its Planner-Executor architecture, released MCP 1.0 in March 2025 and MCP 2.0 with app-level deep links, and in May 2025 partnered with Rokid to push a NaviAgent-plus-smart-glasses combination explicitly scoped for scenic-area commentary, navigation, and historical-cultural interpretation.
Baidu Xiling (百度智能云曦灵) is Baidu's enterprise digital-human platform that provides avatar generation, voice cloning, and multimodal interaction used in cultural-tourism pilots and city-agent deployments, and complements Baidu ERNIE for scripted guidance at museums and demonstration scenic zones, though its own branded scenic deployments are less publicly documented than Tencent or iFlytek equivalents.
ByteDance Volcano Engine (火山引擎) provides the Doubao-family large models and a digital-human service used for 2D avatar kiosks and livestream-style tourism content marketing, and is frequently selected for infrastructure underneath regional cultural-tourism agents and OTA in-video assistants.
China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (中国信通院 / CAICT) drafted the national industry standard for virtual digital human reference architecture and evaluation methods submitted through the CCSA under MIIT with Tencent, Baidu, NetEase, SenseTime and the Nanjing New-Generation AI Institute as co-drafters, released Digital Human System Evaluation Results covering eighteen vendors, and in September 2024 co-published with Tencent Cloud the Cultural-Tourism Industry Large-Model Standard at the Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Summit.
China CYTS Tours Holding (中青旅控股), listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange as 600138, operates Wuzhen and Gubei Water Town where smart guest-control, VR booking, delivery robotics, and third-party ticketing SaaS are piloted annually alongside the World Internet Conference, positioning the group as a destination operator that consumes rather than supplies digital-human technology.
China Tourism Academy (中国旅游研究院) is the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's affiliated think tank whose annual digital-tourism and smart-tourism reports, including the 2025 China Travel Service Industry Development Report, document and benchmark digital-human deployment data feeding national policy and demonstration-base selections.
Chimelong Group (长隆集团) runs flagship properties including Zhuhai Chimelong Ocean Kingdom and Guangzhou Chimelong Paradise, and its 2025 strategy emphasises proprietary IP such as the Panda Trio and Kaka Tiger delivered through integrated ticketing and membership apps, with digital-human usage concentrated in marketing and on-site mascot IP rather than avatar-based guiding at present.
Daokeyun (道可云) is a Beijing-based metaverse cultural-tourism vendor offering an integrated AI smart-tour-guide system combining hand-drawn maps, VR panoramas, AR street reconstruction, digital-human guides, AIGC travelogues, and big-data dashboards, with deployments spanning Qingdao Tourism Group's MR cruise project, Wujirock Stone Forest Park, and more than a hundred cultural-tourism projects.
Dunhuang Academy (敦煌研究院), together with Tencent Interactive Entertainment through the Cultural Heritage Digital Creative Technology Joint Laboratory established on 15 June 2022, produced the Dunhuang Mogao Caves official virtual human Jiayao whose design draws on the Kalavinka motif and Cave 217 murals, and launched the Digital Library Cave experience that serves as an online extension of the on-site ticketed visit.
Fantawild (华强方特), formally Huaqiang Fantawild Holdings, operates more than 40 theme parks built around proprietary IP such as Boonie Bears and Tomb of the Sea, with ticketing, queue management, and in-park navigation delivered through its mobile app and WeChat mini-programs, though its 2025 half-year report disclosed revenue of 2.68 billion yuan down 17.87 percent and has not yet produced a publicly branded scenic-area digital-human guide on par with heritage-site deployments.
Fliggy (飞猪), the Alibaba-owned OTA, released the AI Travel Assistant on 5 March 2025 combining DeepSeek-R1 and Tongyi Qianwen and the Ask-Ask multi-agent product on 17 April 2025 for F5-plus members, and its AI customer service already handles around ten percent of online inquiries with transport cases showing 7 percentage-point higher one-time resolution and 54.7 percent shorter handling time than human agents, though its avatar-based scenic guiding is delivered indirectly via sister brands such as Alipay.
Guaishou AI Digital Human (怪兽AI数字人), operated by Hangzhou Guaishou Intelligent Technology, supplies 2D avatar cloning, 3D virtual hosts, 24/7 livestream software, and holographic cabins marketed as multilingual scenic-area guides supporting Chinese, English, French, German, and Japanese with 24/7 Q-and-A, navigation, and visitor-data analytics, though publicly named 5A deployments remain limited.
Haichang Ocean Park (海昌海洋公园), listed in Hong Kong as 02255, runs theme parks in Shanghai, Dalian, Chengdu, Wuhan, Qingdao, Tianjin, and Yantai and has partnered with Qianxi Robotics, an affiliate of Country Garden, to deploy 16 categories of catering robots across its Shanghai park, with ticketing and "smart scenic + future scenic" integration originally anchored by an Alibaba Fliggy strategic agreement and now extended to IP-based mini-programs around the Ultraman and Monkey King licences.
Hangzhou Bureau of Culture Radio TV and Tourism (杭州市文化广电旅游局), together with Alipay, fields Hangxiaoyi (杭小忆), an AI guide in a qipao covering more than 40,000 service points across the city, activated via Alipay's touch tags, upgraded in 2025 to run on DeepSeek-R1, listed in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's 2024 National Smart Tourism Solutions, and reported to have served more than 2.5 million visitors.
Huawei Cloud Pangu (华为云盘古) provides the five-model Pangu family covering NLP, CV, multimodal, prediction, and scientific computing used through ModelArts Studio as the backbone for government, policing, and city-brain digital humans, and its Pangu Digital Human Brain combined with Pangu Government NLP powers interactive civic and cultural digital employees that are increasingly reused in cultural-tourism demonstration projects, though a standalone Pangu Cultural-Tourism vertical with named scenic deployments is not yet publicly packaged as an independent product line.
iFlytek (科大讯飞), through its AI Virtual Human Interaction Platform powered by the Spark cognitive model, built Tangxiaobao (唐小宝) for Xi'an Datang Everbright City launched at Spring Festival 2025 in partnership with Tongcheng Travel, delivering face-to-face dialogue, navigation, and real-time Q-and-A inside the Datang digital culture-commerce-tourism mini-program and the Datang Huiwan Pass membership card.
Lvji Technology Holdings (驴迹科技), listed on HKEX as 1745, is the largest online intelligent tour-guide e-commentary provider in China, with 46,917 online e-guides covering 297 AAAAA and 2,734 AAAA scenic spots by end-2022, FY2024 revenue of roughly 525 million yuan and net profit of 81.85 million yuan, and a strategy that now emphasises AI interactive tour guides, a Lvji VR product line, a Changyoubao scenic SaaS, and overseas e-guide expansion.
Lvmama (驴妈妈), operated by Shanghai Jingyu Group, pioneered QR-code scenic e-ticketing from 2008 and at peak covered more than ten thousand scenic areas, but its website, app, and mini-program have been offline since 31 January 2024 after a cash-flow collapse tied to more than two billion yuan of receivables, so it is no longer an active participant in the 2026 stack and is flagged as out-of-scope.
Mafengwo (马蜂窝), the Beijing-based UGC and destination-intelligence platform, launched AI Xiaoma in April 2025, AI Luce Shu in July 2025, and the AI-Youxijiang destination agent for Guizhou's Xijiang Qianhu Miao Village in September 2025 as China's first scenic-area-exclusive AI service integration platform spanning ticketing, ID verification, complaints, translation, and audio guiding, alongside the Xiaoma BOT quadruped robot with multilingual commentary showcased at WAIC 2025 and Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit 2025.
Meituan Travel (美团旅行) leverages its local-life app to sell theme-park and scenic tickets via group-buy, launched the Xiaomei AI Life Assistant standalone app on 11 September 2025, rolled out first-wave service-retail AI Digital Employees across 50,000 training stores and 2,000 Kuka furniture stores in mid-2025, and uses unified digital-human livestream hosts for hotel and tour accounts, though avatar-based on-site guiding remains outside its scenic role.
Ministry of Culture and Tourism (文化和旅游部) issued the Smart Tourism Innovation Development Action Plan on 6 May 2024 with four co-signing agencies, selected the National Smart Tourism Immersive Experience New Space Pilots in batches of 24 and 42 projects, published the 2024 National Smart Tourism Solutions on 23 January 2025 under document 办资源函〔2025〕46号, and designates Technology Innovation Centres such as the Scenic-Area Transaction Data Element-ization centre hosted by Piaofutong that feed certificate-free ticketing into the national framework.
National Museum of China (中国国家博物馆) introduced the digital-intelligent humans Aiwenwen (艾雯雯) and Tongguin (仝古今) in July 2022, designed by Shandong University of Arts and Crafts with 3D modelling by Tencent SSV Digital Culture Lab and Fantawild subsidiary Pangoal Digital, driven by Tencent Cloud's interactive technology, and trained on the knowledge graph of the museum's more than 1.4 million collection items to serve on-site and online interpretation.
NetEase Fuxi (网易伏羲) is NetEase's AI and digital-human research lab that supplies avatar generation and game-engine rendering used in cultural-tourism demos and entertainment IP collaborations, though named ticketed-scenic deployments traceable to Fuxi specifically are limited in public sources and marginal to the 2026 ticketing stack.
OCT Group (华侨城) operates Happy Valley parks in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Wuhan, Tianjin, and elsewhere along with the Overseas Chinese Town cultural-tourism complexes, with 2025 IP refreshes drawing on League of Legends and anime licences, ticketing delivered through its own apps and third-party OTAs, and digital-human use concentrated on marketing avatars rather than on-site intelligent guiding.
Palace Museum (故宫博物院) has developed the AI digital-human Gugongxiaozhi as a multilingual interpretation agent inside its digital ecosystem, extending earlier partnerships with Tencent on Digital Gugong and AR and VR heritage-interpretation tools that now plug into its appointment-based ticketing and mini-program entry systems.
Qunar (去哪儿), Baidu-affiliated and primarily a flight and hotel distributor, contributes a large-model-based airfare pre-sale customer-service assistant listed as a Top-10 industry case in 2024 but has no documented digital-human or virtual-tour-guide product at scenic areas, so its role in the 2026 scenic ticketing stack is peripheral and is flagged accordingly.
SenseTime (商汤科技) published the Large-Model-Empowered AI 2.0 Digital Human Platform White Paper under its SenseNova family, supplies avatar rendering and multimodal interaction toolkits used in cultural and retail deployments, and co-drafted the CAICT digital-human reference framework, though its tourism-specific vertical packaging is secondary to its government and enterprise businesses.
Shiyou Technology (世优科技), the Beijing national-level specialised-and-new little-giant, built the Shiyou Bota AI Digital Human v2 released on 6 June 2024, has delivered more than two thousand digital-human cases across sixty-plus industries, holds over sixty patents, participated in the 2022 Hangzhou Asian Games and CCTV Spring Gala, and fields cultural-tourism flagships including the Yining General 3D avatar at the Ili General's Mansion heritage site, the Dali Little Goldenflower city avatar, the Shanxi Cultural Tourism Qingniao star promoter, Shen Xiaoxiang at Mount Hua, and the Huochuchuan Hunan gourmet avatar.
Silicon Intelligence (硅基智能), the Nanjing-based AIGC digital-human leader whose Yandi large model completed generative-AI registration in April 2024, has created more than 500,000 digital-human clones across finance, retail, and exhibition scenarios, open-sourced the DUIX and HeyGem.ai models in 2025 to supply 2D real-person-level avatar SDKs, and its technology is reused in scenic-area virtual tour guides and kiosks by downstream integrators.
Songcheng Performance Development (宋城演艺) runs theme-park-plus-live-performance venues in Hangzhou, Sanya, Lijiang, Zhangjiajie, and elsewhere and in 2025 signed the Silk Road Eternal Love asset-light deal in Qingdao worth 260 million yuan over ten years, while its digital integration is focused on in-theatre special effects and ticketing rather than conversational avatars.
Tencent Cloud Digital Intelligent Human (腾讯云智能数智人), part of the Tencent Cloud CSIG stack known as Tencent Zhiying for consumer-facing creation, powers the National Museum's Aiwenwen and Tongguin, Dunhuang's Jiayao via the Tencent IEG Cultural Heritage Digital Creative Technology Joint Laboratory, the LongNv 3D smart guide, and the Guanya Ida virtual brand officer, and co-released the Cultural-Tourism Industry Large-Model Standard with CAICT in September 2024.
Tencent Cultural Tourism (腾讯文旅), the CSIG business line led by vice-president Luo Chaoliang, has delivered more than three hundred projects including One Phone Tours Yunnan launched in 2018 as China's first province-wide smart-tourism platform, One Phone Tours Wulong, the Longmen Grottoes Internet-Plus Smart Scenic Area with face-recognition entry from 2017, Digital Dunhuang Shijin, the Palace Museum, and Qin Mausoleum, packaged on a stack of WeChat mini-programs, WeMap, LBS big data, RayData 3D, and Tencent Cloud AI.
Tencent Hunyuan (腾讯混元) is the Tencent Cloud large-model family that increasingly underpins Tencent Wenlv cultural-tourism deployments, including retrieval-augmented generation layers behind museum guides and theme-park customer-service bots.
Tongcheng Travel (同程旅行), Suzhou-based and listed as 0780.HK, runs the vertical LLM Chengxin completing both deep-synthesis and large-model filings in early 2024, operates DeepTrip and Chengxin AI since March 2025, has been named in the National Data Bureau's Data Elements × case file as offering paid business and government services including AI digital humans, cultural-tourism data prediction, and digital tourism dashboards with Q-and-A accuracy exceeding eighty percent, and has landed digital-human-plus-destination projects in Suzhou and more than twenty other cities including the Tangxiaobao deployment at Xi'an Datang Everbright City.
Trip.com Group (携程) launched the Scenic-Area Smart Cloud Platform in April 2020 covering ticketing, entry, in-park, and after-sale, onboarded more than forty key inbound scenic spots and over eleven thousand Chinese scenic areas by the 2024 solutions release, released the Ctrip Wendao vertical travel LLM on 17 July 2023 with more than ten billion parameters, and operates the TripGenie international assistant, though its AI layer is chatbot and LLM-based rather than avatar-based and does not brand its own digital-human scenic guide.
Tuniu (途牛) launched the AI Xiaoniu Assistant on 1 April 2025 built on DeepSeek and Tongyi Qianwen as an end-to-end agent with sub-agents for flights, hotels, trains, and packages, open-sourced its core agent code in 2025, and opened an MCP open platform on 9 March 2026 providing standardised travel-service APIs, though avatar-based scenic guiding is not in its catalogue and its role is strictly agentic trip-planning and bookings.
Tuoshi Technology (拓世科技) supplies the Tuoshi Fabao AI Intelligent Digital Human All-in-One and scenic kiosk line used to deploy historical-figure avatars such as Yang Yuhuan at Xi'an Huaqing Palace, the White Snake at Hangzhou Leifeng Pagoda, and Princess Wencheng at the Potala Palace, integrated with local ticketing and interpretation knowledge bases.
Virdync (虚拟动力), the Guangzhou-based motion-capture and AI-interaction vendor, built the Wang Bo digital human at the Tengwang Pavilion in Nanchang where on average 200 visitors per day and more than 12,000 cumulative visitors recite the Preface to the Tengwang Pavilion with the avatar saving over 300,000 yuan per year in labour cost, and also delivered the Virtual Mayor of Nanxun Ancient Town as an interactive cockpit guide.
WiMi Hologram Cloud (微美全息), listed on Nasdaq as WIMI, supplies holographic display hardware, AR content, and volumetric-capture services that feed immersive experience spaces promoted under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism pilots and appear in scenic and theme-park installations, though its involvement in ticketing workflows is limited to content and display rather than the transactional layer.
Xi'an Qujiang Cultural Tourism (西安曲江文旅) operates the Datang Everbright City district and is the official deployment owner of Tangxiaobao co-built with iFlytek and Tongcheng Travel in early 2025, and also promotes Tangxiaoyue (唐小月) as a Douyin-native virtual star with more than 5.6 million followers credited with driving cultural-creative product sales growth of around three hundred percent.
Xmov / MoFa Technology (魔珐科技), the Shanghai studio also referenced as Mofa Technology, MagicFace, and Morpho, supplies the XAvatar production pipeline, Magic-Face motion-capture and high-fidelity 3D avatar rendering used in virtual-idol IPs such as Tianyu that promote Dunhuang culture and collaborate on provincial cultural-tourism campaigns including Shanxi's Finding the Dragon new-year video, feeding downstream scenic-area mini-programs.
[43x Apr 2026]