If we had a dollar for every domestic trip taken in mainland China during the Lunar New Year holiday period, we’d have a tidy 9 billion bucks.
The Great Human Migration is under way, as families reunite to welcome in the Year of the Dragon.
“A record high 9 billion trips are expected to be made within China during the annual 40-day chun yun travel period, the Ministry of Transport said […] with family reunions, sightseeing and leisure activities on the agenda,” reports the South China Morning Post.
“That would be nearly double the 4.7 billion trips made during the so-called Spring Festival travel rush in 2023 when ultra-strict Covid-19 restrictions were abolished,” says Reuters.
China Central Television reckons that about 80 per cent of those trips will be taken by car, with 480 million journeys by train and 80 million by plane.
The demand for travel tickets on January 26, the first day of this year’s rush, was such that even the world’s largest high-speed rail network was unable to keep up.
Reuters spoke to Miranda Guo, a 25-year-old cartoonist at a Hangzhou-based technology firm, who “was lucky to have secured a seat on a bullet train to Jinan. But that was only after forking out an additional 60 yuan [US$8.50], 13 per cent of the ticket price, on an ‘accelerator package’ offered by third-party booking apps”.
Guo told the newswire: “It’s hard to buy a ticket this year, with almost all my colleagues failing to get tickets. Many of them are still on waiting lists.”
To help with the airport queues, Air China has “arranged nearly 1,700 flights per day during the 40-day chun yun travel period to meet the extraordinary demand, representing a 32 per cent increase from 2019”, reports the Post.
Airports in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou are going to be the busiest, of course, but a report by tech company Baidu revealed that chilly Harbin – home to the ongoing International Ice and Snow Festival – is proving more popular with the holiday crowd this year than perennial tourist favourites Hangzhou, Kunming, Haikou and Sanya.
And beyond China, Baidu says, “Demand for international travel among Chinese is also expected to rise following a flurry of visa-free agreements with Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore as well as France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.”
China’s aviation authorities have, we’re told, arranged more than 2,500 additional flights to Southeast Asia and other international Asian destinations over the Lunar New Year holiday.
One country that could do with seeing some of those migrating masses, as well as some of that fictional 9 billion dollars, is Indonesia.