Can foreigners use Meituan and Dianping for food delivery, deals and restaurant reviews?

Meituan (美团) is the delivery and deals app: its store listing covers food, takeout, ride-hailing, hotels and train tickets. Dianping (大众点评), from the same group, is where people look up restaurants and read reviews, and it also sells group-buy deals and books tickets and hotels.

Both apps now have an English interface. Meituan's Google Play listing says the app "now supports four interface languages: Simplified Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean". Apple's App Store lists Dianping in English, Japanese, Korean and Simplified and Traditional Chinese; The Paper reported in December 2025 that Dianping added English and Korean versions early that year, and People's Daily reported that Dianping's Must-Eat list got an English version in 2025. Menus and reviews are written by shops and users, so expect much of that text to stay in Chinese.

Paying with a foreign card: the Meituan Pay service agreement (operated by its licensed payment company Qiandaibao, updated 30 March 2026) has an appendix for cards issued by banks outside the mainland, including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. To bind one, Meituan Pay asks for your real name, ID type, number and expiry, sex, nationality, contact details, occupation, address and a photo of your passport, plus the card number, CVV and expiry. If you have only bound a foreign card and not completed real-name verification, you can pay with it but cannot use or top up a Meituan balance or make transfers. The agreement does not list which card networks are accepted; for card networks in general see binding a foreign card to Alipay and WeChat.

Phone numbers are the weak point. Meituan's 2018 user agreement warned that an account registered with a foreign phone number cannot pass security verification and so loses some account benefits, such as some promotions. The current agreement, dated December 2023, no longer carries that warning, but reviewers on Google Play still report errors when signing up with a foreign number. Set the app up before you are hungry.

If the Meituan app will not let you in, go through Alipay. Beijing's official guide for new arrivals tells foreign visitors to search for the Meituan mini-program inside Alipay, alongside DiDi, Trip.com and Ele.me, and notes that Alipay has a built-in translator. Payment then runs through your Alipay wallet.

Group-buy deals (团购) are vouchers you pay for in the app and show at the shop. Under Meituan's group-buy terms, a voucher cannot be used after the validity period printed on it. Whether an unused voucher refunds automatically depends on the rule shown on that deal's page, such as "refund anytime" or "auto-refund on expiry"; read it before you buy.

Meituan's shared bikes are harder. A 2024 China.com.cn investigation found that foreign passports went through manual review behind a hard-to-find entry. For getting around, DiDi is the better-documented route.

Neither app's published terms say whether table booking works for foreign-number accounts. If a dinner matters, book through your hotel or call the restaurant.