Tourism is more than a leisure activity; it serves as a powerful catalyst for personal transformation. Through exposure to diverse cultures, lifestyles, and social contexts, tourism experiences can enhance social awareness and shape moral values or sustained altruistic behaviors (e.g., Alizadeh & Filep, 2023; Filep et al., 2017). However, few studies have examined the enduring impact of tourism experiences on altruistic behaviors. We follow the intergroup contact theory (Brewer & Miller, 1984) to justify that tourism experience as a intergroup contact, could stimulate an empathy effect to translate the contact into social participation and then altruisma (e.g., Batson et al., 2007; Dovidio et al., 2017); thus, we hypothesize that a household’s tourism expenditure would promote altruistic expenditure via facilitating its social participation. Using the longitudinal household survey database from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study from 2011 to 2018, this research note documents that a household’s tourism expenditure causally promotes altruistic behavior, with robustness to different types of data used (cross-sectional data vs panel data) and the identification strategies (instrumental variable estimation vs placebo tests). Moreover, we adopt causal mediation analysis and show that social participation mediates the effect of interest, and that this mediation is robust to potential endogeneity and other confounding mediators. Ultimately, we document that tourism (experience) facilitates altruistic behavior via social participation.