People in China Prefer Short Trips in China's Golden Week
By admin on 2014-12-22

    Short-distance trips have won favor of Chinese during the eight-day Golden Week which extended by one day this year as the Mid-Autumn festival falls in the period.

    The China Travel Service Head Office monitored that domestic travels and short and medium outbound routes, particularly to Taiwan and Hong Kong, have become popular.

    Dun Jidong, market manager of China Travel Service Head Office, said the weather in Hong Kong during the National Day Holiday was pleasant, attracting lots of tourists. The route to Taiwan was also a potential tourism market.

    "Prices for tours are lower than that in previous years due to the global financial crisis and A/H1N1 flu," he said.

    The Beijing Tourist Bureau said scenic spots in the city's suburban areas saw a travel peak in the latter half of the holiday period.

    The number of cars leaving Beijing hit 284,000 on Tuesday, the sixth day in the Golden Week, representing an increase of 21.4 percent from the previous day, according to the traffic control department under the Ministry of Public Security.

    Wang Yunfeng, a civil servant in Shanghai, said he took the first three days of the holiday to visit his parents in neighboring Shandong Province. Then he returned home in Shanghai to enjoyed the leisure at home with his wife and daughter.

    "I rarely had so much time at home to stay with my family. I don't want to go anywhere for travel," he said.

    Li Qin, a professor on sociology with the Shandong University, said more and more Chinese tourists take advantage of the National Day Golden Week to enjoy themselves at home rather than spending on long-distance travel.

    The China Tourism Academy forecast before the holiday that the number of tourists on China's mainland could surpass 200 million during the eight-day holiday, while tourist income is expected to be more than 100 billion yuan (14.7 billion U.S. dollars), an increase of 25 percent over the same period of last year.

    The country's first National Day Golden Week appeared in 1999, when the number of tourists was 28 million.