Passengers return from Nanjing Railway Station in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China, Oct 6, 2023.
Nurphoto | Getty Images
BEIJING — China’s big “Golden Week” holiday saw domestic tourism rebound to around pre-pandemic levels, while overseas travel had yet to totally get well, in keeping with official figures.
Those numbers for the eight-day holiday that ended Friday also got here in lower than the federal government had initially predicted.
Golden Week domestic tourism revenue was 753.43 billion yuan ($103.24 billion) — a 1.5% increase from that in 2019, in keeping with China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The variety of domestic tourist trips rose by 4.1% from 2019 to 826 million in the course of the latest eight-day holiday, the ministry said.
Each figures were lower than what Chinese state media had earlier cited the ministry as predicting: 896 million trips and 782.5 billion yuan in domestic tourism revenue.
Nonetheless, the ultimate tourism revenue figure still marked a rebound to 2019 levels for the primary time since China ended its Covid-19 restrictions late last yr, Morgan Stanley’s Chief China Economist Robin Xing and a team identified in a note Friday.
They added that on a per capita basis, spending returned to 98% of 2019 levels, much higher than the 85% figure seen during holidays earlier within the yr.
“This is probably going because of an extra-long Golden Week holiday (eight days vs. seven normally), which encouraged long-distance travel and thus boosted average spending,” the Morgan Stanley analysts said.
This yr, the normal Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival and the Oct. 1 National Holiday were close enough that Beijing declared an eight-day holiday from Friday, Sept. 29 to Friday, Oct. 6, the official dates of this yr’s Golden Week.
That meant the next Saturday and Sunday were officially working days, but some businesses didn’t resume work until Monday.
In a rustic where businesses typically only provide a handful of paid vacation days, the week-plus break also meant more people selected to travel overseas.
The National Immigration Administration recorded about 11.8 million trips out and in of mainland China in the course of the holiday, for a every day average of nearly 1.5 million trips — that is 85.1% of 2019 levels.
That was also below earlier predictions, reported by state media, which forecast nearly 1.6 million trips across the border a day.
Chinese travel booking site Trip.com Group said outbound travel in the course of the holiday surged by greater than eight times versus a yr ago, with people of their mid-20s to early 30s accounting for nearly 30% of such travelers.
Top destinations included Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea, Trip.com said. It noted that Switzerland, Spain, Turkey, the U.K. and France saw the fastest growth in tourist numbers versus China’s Labor Day holiday in May.
Trip.com didn’t provide comparisons to 2019. CEO Jane Sun previously told CNBC’s Eunice Yoon that long wait times for visa applications — similar to two to 6 months to go to Europe — are keeping people in China from traveling internationally as much as they’d wish to.
The uptick in Chinese tourism comes because the country’s rebound from the pandemic has slowed, dragged down partially by a property market slump.
“The National Day golden week tourism data, along with the still above-50 September services [purchasing managers indexes], suggest the services recovery has decelerated but continues,” Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a note Sunday.
“We consider additional policy easing will likely be mandatory for further recovery in consumption and services, especially given the continued property downturn and still-dampened confidence,” the report said.
The analysts maintained their China GDP forecast of 5.4% for the yr.
