About Downtouch

The honest arrival guide for mainland China. Free, no ads, no signup needed to browse.

Why this exists

Every China guide is either "don't worry" or "you'll be locked out". Both are wrong. The first 24 hours are the hard part — payment freezes, hotel rejections, name mismatches, dead apps — and each has a boring, reliable fix. Downtouch is those fixes, structured like the thing you actually see when you land: an airport board.

What's inside

Visa Desk — interactive checker for the 30-day visa-free and 240-hour transit policies
Driver Cards — every place on the boards opens as a card with the Chinese name, address and phrases; show it to any taxi
Shared Boards — 200 passport-friendly hotels, 275 restaurants, 116 sights, updated by travelers
The Six Known Issues — what actually breaks, and the fix for each

Where the data comes from

City rankings: Ctrip Research Institute 2025 inbound data. Hotels: Trip.com Traveller Picks, TripAdvisor, Booking.com snapshots (Oct 2026). Dining: Dianping top-reviewed, foreigner-vetted. Policies: NIA (nia.gov.cn), verified Oct 2026. Everything else: traveler reports from r/chinatravel & r/chinalife.

Honesty rules: static data is labeled with its verification date and re-checked quarterly; policies monthly. The passport-friendly and foreign-card flags come from real check-ins — and you can update them after yours. If our data got something wrong, the boards are the fastest way to fix it for everyone.

How it stays free

Affiliate links (hotel booking, eSIM, tickets) may earn us a small commission — they never change what we recommend or how we rank. No display ads, ever. See our privacy policy: we collect almost nothing.

Contact

hello@downtouch.travel (replace with your real inbox before launch — see DEPLOY.md)