'Hottest Mid-Autumn Festival': flight bookings in China up 60 percent

China's tourism sector has rarely seen a holiday start like this one. Yicai reports that domestic flight bookings on 25 September, the first day of the extended Mid-Autumn Festival, came in 60 percent higher than a year earlier. Chinese media are calling it the hottest Mid-Autumn Festival on record.

An unusual calendar drove the surge. More than 50 Chinese universities gave students 13 days off. Bookings by people aged 13 to 18 and by those aged 19 to 22 both more than doubled.

Short trips and 'hotel plus attraction' packages

Short distances dominated anyway. Local trips and trips near home made up more than 60 percent of orders. Ticket sales to nearby attractions were 36 percent higher than on the first day of the Dragon Boat Festival. Searches for moon viewing and autumn landscapes rose more than threefold week on week.

The average order value grew too. Packages that combine a hotel with admission to an attraction gained 19 percent, and bookings of family hotel rooms gained 21 percent. Among people booking small-scale stays, so-called homestays, customers born after 1995 and after 2000 placed more than 45 percent of orders.

The top ten cities by hotel bookings were Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Qingdao, Chengdu, Xi'an, Guangzhou and Jinan. Shanghai alone received 2,773,800 tourists on 25 September, and hotel occupancy in the city reached 52.46 percent.

Transport: longer and farther

The extended weekend also changed the shape of travel. Flight bookings for routes longer than 2,000 km rose 76 percent and took more than a quarter of the total. Orders covering several destinations rose 70 percent. The biggest gains came on Shanghai to Urumqi, up 235 percent, Shanghai to Kunming, up 91 percent, and Beijing to Kunming, up 67 percent.

Shared rides appeared on the roads as well. The carpooling platform Hello Chuxing forecast about 80 million trips over the holiday, 30 percent more than a year earlier. More than 44 percent of them were intercity, and 29 percent covered routes longer than 200 km. Users had made more than one million bookings on the platform since 25 August.

In ride-hailing, Didi recorded a 13 percent rise in taxi orders on the departure day and 21 percent on the holiday itself. Intercity rides rose 23 and 55 percent respectively. The average advance price of a domestic flight ticket was 10 percent lower than a year earlier, so record demand did not turn into record prices.