The May Day holidays opened on an upbeat note, with flight and hotel bookings hitting record highs on Saturday, as “revenge” travel and consumption is now all the rage over the five-day holiday, the first long break Chinese people could enjoy taking trips this year after the stay-put-advocated Spring Festival.
Bookings for flights taking off Saturday, the first day of the May Day holidays, hit a rec-ord high, per data provided by Chinese online travel agency platform Qunar to Global Times on Sunday.
The figure suggests a rise of about 20 percent over the bookings for the first day of May Day holidays in 2019.
Passenger trips via railways, roads, waterways and air hit 58.27 million on the first day of the May Day holidays, up 119.2 percent year-on-year, with railways handling 18.83 mil-lion passenger trips and air passengers trips totaling 1.87 million, showed data from the Ministry of Transport.
Meanwhile, bookings for hotels that were checked into Saturday also hit a fresh high, the Qunar data showed. The fever continued into Sunday, with Shanghai Disneyland Hotel fully booked for Sunday check-ins. Bookings for hotels surrounding the Badaling Great Wall in Beijing soared 80 percent compared with 2019.
The frenzy is not only confined to travel hotspots. Many hotels in Anshan, Northeast China’s Liaoning Province, traditionally not a tourist city, were also booked out on Sat-urday.
Tickets for the Summer Palace in Beijing until Tuesday had been sold out as of 8am Sunday with the hotspot’s Wednesday ticket allocation 86 percent booked out, theBeijing Youth Daily reported Sunday.
The holiday also fired up other sources of consumer spending.
The country’s box office totaled 455.47 million yuan ($70.37 million) on Saturday, ac-cording to Chinese ticketing platform Maoyan. The May Day holiday box office, includ-ing presales, had surpassed 800 million yuan as of 9:30pm Sunday.
On top of that, the second May 5 shopping festival kicked off in Shanghai on Saturday, with realtime consumer payout data from China UnionPay, Alipay and Tencent Pay showing that consumers forked out over 2 billion yuan from 8pm to 10pm Saturday. By comparison, it took nearly three hours for the spending data to top 2 billion yuan dur-ing last year’s Shanghai shopping festival.
Photo:VCG
