This New Year holiday, which lasted from December 31 to January 2, was the first holiday since China optimized its COVID-19 control measures in early December last year. As a large number of people had already recovered from COVID-19 infection, they chose to travel during the holiday.

In Sanya, a coastal city in the island province of Hainan renowned for its beach resorts, tourists spent their holiday swimming, eating seafood, sunbathing and visiting scenic spots.

A tourist from Beijing, surnamed Wang, told China News Service that his family had recovered from COVID-19 and was enjoying the holiday in the coastal city. He said he would fly back to Beijing after the holiday but other family members would stay there for the remainder of winter.

Xu Xiangyu, a senior director of the marketing and public relations department of Atlantis Sanya, China's first Atlantis resort, said, "From the reservations we have received, we can see that people's enthusiasm for traveling has been recovering and keeps increasing." He continued that the occupation rate of the hotel was nearly 90 percent at the end of December 2022 and reservations for hotel rooms for the Spring Festival holiday, which will stretch from January 21 to 27, are also rising. He said the tourism market in Sanya is expected to experience a new boom by this upcoming holiday.

Long queues are common during peak tourist season. During the New Year holiday in Sanya, tourists needed to queue to check in at hotels and to shop at the Sanya International Duty-Free Shopping Complex, and cars were lining up to enter the parking lots of scenic spots.

Feng Chao, Vice President of the Wuzhizhou Island Scenic Spot in Sanya, said the number of tourists at the location had returned to 2019 levels. Compared with 2019, customers were more targeted in choosing tourism products. "They have already decided whether to go sightseeing, diving or camping before their arrival," he added.

Travel rush 

According to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism (MCT), the domestic tourism market registered 52.71 million trips during the holiday. This was 42.8 percent of the level during the same period back in 2019. The tourism industry earned revenues of 26.5 billion yuan ($3.8 billion) during the holiday, or 35.1 percent of the 2019 level during the same period.

The recovery of the industry has promoted the rebound of related industries such as the hotel and civil aviation sectors. According to a report on tourism consumption during the New Year holiday published by online travel agency TravelGo on January 2, reservations for domestic air tickets during the holiday increased by 2 percent and hotel reservations by 32 percent from the same period in 2020.

Reservations for hotels in Luoyang in Henan Province, Xishuangbanna in Yunnan Province, and Harbin in Heilongjiang Province increased more than 10 times year on year during the holiday on the TravelGo platform and many hotels in Sanya and Xiamen in Fujian Province were fully booked.

Ice and snow tourism also proved popular during the break. This is the first snow season following the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022. Facilities for winter sports have been improved, the ice and snow industry is expanding, and people are showing greater enthusiasm for winter sports.

Ski resorts across the country have opened to attract tourists. In Yabuli Town, Harbin, the 20th Yabuli Ski Festival officially kicked off on December 8, 2022, themed Cool Snow Life. In addition to skiing, tourists can also experience local customs in villages, enjoy hot springs in the forest and attend an electronic music festival. 

In Zhangjiakou, one of the host cities of Beijing 2022, tourists have flocked to the Yunding Ski Resort in its Chongli District to ski on the same tracks as the Olympic champions. Many hotels there were fully occupied over the holiday.

With the improvement of winter sports facilities, ice and snow tourist destinations are no longer limited to north China. Some southern provinces have also become hot destinations for winter sports tourism.

On December 16, 2022, the 23rd South China Ice and Snow Festival opened at Xiling Snow Mountain in Dayi, a county in Chengdu, Sichuan Province.

Tourists can engage in football, tug of war and curling on snow and ice during the festival. It will also feature skiing performances by people wearing hanfu, a traditional Chinese clothing style.

According to Fliggy, Alibaba Group's online travel platform, reservations for ice and snow tourism products increased by 30 percent year on year during the New Year holiday. Changbai Mountain in Jilin Province, Yabuli in Heilongjiang and Chongli in Hebei Province have become the top three ice and snow tourism destinations, while Guangdong Province, Shanghai and Zhejiang Province have become the top three source regions of ice and snow tourists.

In contrast to ice and snow tourism, tours to warmer destinations were also on the rise as these places were favored by tourists who had just recovered from COVID-19. On the Fliggy website, sales of tourism products in Hainan increased by more than 50 percent during the New Year holiday. Guangdong, Fujian and Macao Special Administrative Region, which are warmer in winter, are also popular destinations. Holiday reservations for tourism products containing keywords such as "seascape," "island" and "surfing" surged by more than 60 percent on the platform.

According to online travel agency Ctrip, cities near or south of the Tropic of Cancer such as Xishuangbanna and Dali in Yunnan and Beihai in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region are gaining more popularity than in previous years. For instance, reservations for plane tickets to Xishuangbanna increased by 71 percent year on year during the holiday.

New trends 

With the easing of pandemic control measures, demand for long-distance travel has increased. According to data from Ctrip, nearly 60 percent of its users chose to travel to other provinces over the break, compared with less than 40 percent during the same period in 2022. According to the Data Center of the MCT, people traveling to destinations in southwest, northwest and central China mainly come from the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta regions. Sanya, Xishuangbanna and Kunming in Yunnan and Xiamen have become the main tourist destinations for tourists from Beijing and the three provinces in northeast China—Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning.

Dai Bin, President of the China Tourism Academy, said online searches for long-distance destinations, including overseas destinations, began to recover around late December last year.

The number of reservations for cross-border air tickets increased by 145 percent year on year during the holiday, according to Ctrip. According to Fliggy, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Viet Nam were the most popular overseas destinations.

People born after 1990 now make up a major segment of the tourism market. According to Ctrip, the proportion of tourists born between 1990 and 2009 increased by 36 percent year on year during the holiday while the proportion of senior tourists declined by 53 percent.

Theme parks, which were closed many times during the pandemic, witnessed a surge in visitors during the New Year break. Shanghai Disneyland, the Chimelong Ocean Kingdom in Zhuhai, Guangdong and the Universal Beijing Resort were the three most popular theme parks.

Analysis by TravelGo suggests the recovery of the tourism market has already exceeded expectations in some destinations and shows the speedy recovery of domestic tourists' confidence to travel. The New Year holiday recovery has laid a sound foundation for the revival of the tourism market in 2023.

(Print Edition Title: Tourism Revival) 

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson 

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