China is bracing for a bumper travel season with a jump in sales of train and plane tickets for the 8-day Golden Week holiday that runs from September 29 to October 6 and includes both the National Day holiday and Mid-Autumn Festival.
About 190 million passenger trips by train are expected to be made during the travel rush period from September 27 to October 8, in contrast to 72 million trips during the same period in 2022 and 138 million in 2019, according to China Railway, the country’s railway operator.
The railway operator reported a new single-day record in ticket sales, selling 22.9 million tickets on September 22 alone. It also said it will increase seating capacity by 18.5 percent from the same period in 2019 to meet growing needs.
About 21 million passenger trips by plane are expected to be made during the holiday, with 137,000 flights scheduled in total, or about 17,000 flights per day, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China.
About 14,000 flights are planned daily on domestic routes, up 18 percent from 2019. The country has also resumed passenger flights to about 90 percent of the countries it flew to before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The most popular destinations for long-haul trips in China include Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, according to online travel platform Ctrip.
Overseas trips during the holiday are registering a skyrocketing increase. The number of overall bookings for outbound travel jumped nearly 20-fold from the same period in 2022, with Thailand, South Korea and Malaysia among the top three destinations.