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China domestic Tourism doubled During the Lunar New Year as COVID Curbs End
(CTN News) – This year’s Lunar New Year vacation saw over a quarter of domestic travel to China, while cross-border travel more than quadrupled in the first six days of the week-long break that followed the lifting of tight COVID-19 limits.
Data from the culture and tourism ministry indicated on Friday that 308 million tourist excursions inside China had been made overall during the current holiday season, an increase of 23.1% from the Lunar New Year break in 2022 and a recovery to 88.6% of the figure in 2019.
After almost three years of sporadic city-wide lockdowns, sluggish economic development, and a disturbed tourist and hospitality industry, China started to roll back its strict zero-COVID policies in December.
According to statistics from the tourism ministry, domestic tourism produced 375.84 billion yuan ($55.41 billion) in revenue during the holiday season, which is 73.1% more than in 2019.
According to statistics on travels taken by different modes of transportation, the National Immigration Administration (NIA) said on Friday that 2.39 million trips were made into and out of China over the first six days of the vacation, rising 123.9% from the Jan. 31 to Feb. 5 period in 2017.
Early in January, authorities abolished the rule that incoming travelers had to go through hotel quarantine upon arrival; this rule severely restricted foreign travel.
Despite the increase, pre-COVID levels of foreign travel during the holidays have not yet been attained.
12.53 million cross-border journeys were undertaken overall for the Lunar New Year vacation in 2019, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
According to data from the travel operator Ctrip, the number of domestic and international travel bookings made on its platform for the Lunar New Year vacation surged to a three-year high in 2023, with this year’s total number of bookings for tourism being four times higher than last year’s.
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