China’s tourism sector is expected to receive a further boost during the upcoming eight-day combined holiday for the National Day and the Mid-Autumn Festival, which will run from Oct.1 to 8.

This year’s Mid-Autumn Festival falls on Oct. 1, coinciding with National Day, adding an extra day to the seven-day National Day holiday.

Tiananmen Square during National Day holiday in 2018. (Photo/CRI Online)

From Aug. 31 to early September, the number of people searching online for train tickets for trips during the upcoming holiday surged by 83 percent from last year. Tickets for certain trips during the holiday are all sold out, according to data from qunar.com, a leading online travel services platform in China.

Data from Chinese online travel services and social networking platform Mafengwo showed that the first small travel peak of this year’s combined holiday for the National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival is expected to start ahead of Sept. 26, as many young people plan to ask for four days’ leave so that they can enjoy more than 10 days of travel.

The major travel peak will arrive on Sept. 30 and Oct.1, while some tourists who plan to enjoy short and medium-distance tours will start their trips on Oct. 3 to avoid the travel rush, suggested Mafengwo.

80 percent of the people surveyed by aoyou.com, a Chinese travel services website, plan to travel during the upcoming holiday, with white-collar workers between the ages of 26 and 45 accounting for 80 percent of the total.

It’s also worth noting that modes of travel such as small-scale group tours, customized tours and road trips have become popular as people are now more aware of the necessity of epidemic prevention and control.

Customized tours are witnessing rapid development and rocketing popularity, with more than 40 percent of tourists preferring this novel way to travel for the eight-day combined holiday, according to relevant data.

The number of orders for customized tours during this year’s Golden Week holiday has increased by 24 percent year on year, indicated data from Mafengwo.

In addition, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more Chinese people have shown increasing preference for road trips which are freer and safer. Online searches on the topic “road trips during National Day holiday” have seen a 153-percent month-on-month surge, suggested big data from Mafengwo.

Southwest China’s Yunnan province, Guizhou province, Sichuan province, Chongqing municipality, Tibet autonomous region and east China’s Jiangsu province, Zhejiang province, Shanghai municipality, Shandong province, and Fujian province are the top 10 popular domestic tourist destinations for the combined holiday, with Yunnan being the most popular among tourists.

In addition to the traditional popular travel destinations during the National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival holidays, such as Sanya, Lijiang, Kunming, Xiamen, Xi’an, Lhasa, Harbin, Guiyang, Chengdu, and Jiuzhaigou, other tourist destinations in the northwest of China have become hugely popular this year, with the number of relevant online searches surging by 475 percent from the previous year, according to data released by China’s largest online travel platform Ctrip.

Sightseeing tours of destinations such as deserts, great rivers and Danxia landforms as well as activities including camel-riding camel and visits to the ruins of the ancient Silk Road in northwestern China have become popular choices this year, suggested data from Ctrip.

This combined eight-day holiday will be the last statutory holiday in China this year, which is also one of the main reasons for the growing enthusiasm of Chinese people for travels.

With more tourists going out to enjoy their travels during the upcoming holiday, China’s tourism sector is set to see a faster recovery, said Luo Jun, co-founder of Tujia, a Chinese online platform for vacation rentals, and Sweetome, a Shanghai-based global accommodation sharing operator.