May Day holiday unleashes tourism frenzy as Chinese tourists throw off the shackles of the Covid-19 era

Frustrated by three years of restrictions, Chinese travellers flew further afield and in far greater numbers than at any time since 2019
The travel bonanza will have given a welcome boost to consumption as Chinese holidaymakers tend to spend big, according to a tourism analyst

China's border reopening

Pearl Liu

Published: 6:00am, 4 May 2023

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The May Day holiday unleashed a tourism frenzy in mainland China as frustrated travellers cast off the shackles of Covid-19 and flew further afield and in far greater numbers than at any time in the last three years.

The first long national holiday since Beijing abandoned its tough pandemic restrictions saw Chinese tourists flying an average distance of 1,638km, according to travel giant Trip.com Group.

Equivalent to a trip from Shanghai in eastern China to Inner Mogolia’s Hohhot, that is by far the highest in the last three years and just 2 per cent shy of 2019, before the novel coronavirus first emerged.

Sales of tickets for overseas flights were eight times higher than during the Labour Day holiday last year, Trip.com data showed. About 70 per cent of those flights were to destinations in Asia, led by Hong Kong, Bangkok, Macau and Singapore.

The travel bonanza will have given a welcome boost to consumption, according to Peng Han, director of the strategic research centre of the Ctrip Research Institute.

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“The eagerness for a long-haul holiday among Chinese travellers has been unleashed during this year’s Labour Day holiday,” said Peng.

“As Chinese people have a tradition of spending more during trips than at home, long-haul travel means a brisk recovery of consumption related to travel, such as catering, hotels, transport and entertainment.”

Known as the Labour Day or May Day holiday, the five-day break which ended on Wednesday, marked the first days-long break in China since Beijing shelved its zero-Covid strategy in December. It is also often referred to as “golden week”.

The domestic tourism market, worth an estimated US$1 trillion, was once an important driver of economic growth before Covid-19 curbs including citywide lockdowns kept people at home or at least deterred them from straying far. Overseas travellers from mainland China spent US$255 billion, accounting for 17 per cent of global outbound travel expenditure, in 2019, according to data from the United Nations World Tourism Organisation.

On Saturday, the first day of the golden week, 165,669 Chinese holidaymakers crossed the border into Hong Kong, according to the city’s Immigration Department, up from virtually none this time last year as the pandemic raged. On the same day some 100,000 visitors poured into the gambling hub of Macau, roughly double the number a year ago, data from the Macau government showed.

The average price of an outbound flight tickets was 2,104 yuan (US$304.39) during the May Day break, about a third higher than in 2019, as demand outstripped the supply of seats. Some 80 per cent more holidaymakers opted for first class and business class tickets as compared to four years ago. The number of scheduled international departures from China last month was just over a third of the number in April 2019, according to data compiled by HSBC.

Lu Ting, chief China economist at Nomura, predicts that “pent-up demand from wealthy Chinese after the three-year border closure, and some capital flight” will lead to a 90 per cent recovery of the country’s outbound tourism expenditure next year.

As well as those actually jetting off during golden week, plenty more were looking at travel options online. Data from FlightAi, a data and intelligence provider under Ctrip, shows searches for international flights, led by Macau, the United Arab Emirates and the Maldives, soared 60 per cent during the Labour Day holiday from the same period in 2019.