Chinese consumers appear to be spending more money during the National Day holiday than last year. On the first two days of the eight-day holiday (October 1 through 8), Chinese consumers spent CNY628 billion using UnionPay cards, up 11.8% year-on-year. On National Day, October 1, which this year overlapped with the Mid-Autumn Festival, the transaction volume recorded by UnionPay reached CNY330 billion, up 15.5% on a yearly basis. “With the recovery of tourists’ confidence, higher travel demand will be activated in the country. Trips to western China, island tours, and tailored road trips are expected to become important forces that help the recovery of the tourism sector after Covid-19,” said Gou Zhipeng, President of Qunar, a Beijing-based online travel agency.

The extended National Day holiday has been the longest public vacation since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year. Long distance trips and tours of western parts of China have seen growing popularity. Tibet, Xinjiang and Ningxia saw the fastest growth of spending on a yearly basis in the first two days of the holiday week, according to UnionPay. “With vast land and lower population density, western China fits with the psychology of tourists to avoid crowds in the post-epidemic period,” said Zhang Jinshan, Tourism Industry Professor at Beijing Union University. “In recent years, the National Day holidays were often peak periods for international trips. Due to the pandemic this year, Chinese tourists chose domestic long-distance trips instead, and it helped the western region to gain popularity,” Zhang added. On the first two days of the eight-day holiday, tourists’ spending on hotels in Tibet more than doubled year-on-year, while spending on catering grew 49%. In Xinjiang, the amount spent on flight tickets tripled, and spending on admission tickets for sightseeing spots in Ningxia increased by 20%.

Meanwhile, Chinese consumers have shown continued enthusiasm for the Shanghai Disneyland theme park. The average price of bed-and-breakfast home stays within 3 kilometers of the park was higher than CNY1,000 per night during the holiday, Qunar found. About 550 million people are forecast to take domestic trips during the holiday, about 70% of the level seen last year, according to an earlier estimate by the China Tourism Academy. With more than half of the holiday over, some flight tickets and hotels have reduced prices. For instance, on October 5, a one-way flight from Beijing to Lijiang, Yunnan province, was selling for CNY396. A one-way flight from Beijing to Sanya, Hainan province, cost only CNY445. Prices of flights from Shanghai to some top domestic tourism destinations also dropped, according to Qunar, the China Daily reports.