Dragon Trail Supports Marriott Vacation Club’s China Expansion

Marriott Vacation Club offers members access to more than 60 resorts around the world, including seven in the Asia Pacific region – as well as many other affiliated properties from the Marriott portfolio. In 2025, the brand expanded its offerings in Asia and investment into the Chinese market to meet growing demand. During this time, Dragon Trail delivered increased sales leads for Marriott Vacation Club in China through media buy and organic channels, as well as boosting the brand’s reputation on Chinese social media.

Social media and reputation management

Dragon Trail supports Marriott Vacation Club to manage its social media presence in China through original content creation, reputation management, influencer marketing, and media buy, with a focus on RedNote and WeChat.

Between August 2025 and January 2026, we organized seven KOL (key opinion leader) trips to Marriott Vacation Club properties in Phuket and Bali. The diverse spread of KOLs covered travel, lifestyle, fashion, and photography, with a strong emphasis on the family travel market – the core demographic for Marriott Vacation Club’s villa-style vacation properties. With influencer content posted across both RedNote and Weibo, these visits resulted in 15.4 million exposures, 3.5 million views, and close to 50k interactions with content promoting Marriott Vacation Club on Chinese social media.

Marriott Vacation Club’s influencer marketing on RedNote focused primarily on the family market

We also ran a KOC (key opinion consumer) campaign on RedNote, working with 30 smaller influencers, who visited four Marriott Vacation Club properties in Phuket, Khao Lak, and Bali. We gave the KOCs clear guidelines and tips about how to optimize their post titles, content organization, and hashtags, as well as how to respond to questions and comments in order to increase the posts’ reach and the weight of positive comments. We boosted these posts using RedNote’s Koubeitong media buy tool, resulting in 670k exposures, 82k views, and more than 8,000 interactions.

Alongside these campaigns, Dragon Trail helped Marriott Vacation Club to regularly post organic content and manage brand reputation through customer interaction and keyword optimization. Results were noticeable: From October 2025 to January 2026, we saw a 40% decrease in negative posts and more than 70% increase in positive posts relating to Marriott Vacation Club on RedNote, alongside an increase of more than 40% in user engagement with the brand.

Media buy

Throughout 2025, Dragon Trail managed Marriott Vacation Club’s media buy on WeChat, RedNote, and programmatic advertising across online travel platforms. Our data-driven media buy strategy delivered 11,000+ leads across Chinese digital channels in 2025.

Media buy advertisements for Marriott Vacation Club on RedNote in 2025

Media buy campaigns throughout the year centered on special offers for resorts in Tokyo Bay and Phuket, as well as a Golden Week promotion, and a coop with China Southern Airlines. Dragon Trail designed and wrote the ad creatives for these offers, continuously optimizing the content based on performance feedback.

Dragon Trail also built a customized CRM system for the project to manage leads and conversion, integrating multi-platform campaign performance data for a clear and accessible back-end overview of how each offer was performing.

With an expanded Shanghai marketing team in place and expansion of its Bali property in early 2026, Marriott Vacation Club’s growth in the China market is set to continue this year – supported by improved online visibility and increased sales leads delivered through Dragon Trail’s work.

Dragon Trail offers full market representation services in China, including sales calls, representation at travel trade events, and media relations. We’re also highly experienced at website and mini-program development, social media and influencer marketing, PR and events, and travel agent training and communications. Contact us today to discuss how we can help establish and improve your hotel’s business with the Chinese outbound travel market.