More people are going abroad for Chinese New Year — and where they go, and what they do there, has changed

Outbound travel over Chinese New Year cost more than 10,000 yuan a head in 2017. Did you do your part?

You've been back at work for two weeks. Have you shaken off the post-holiday slump yet? And over that lovely Chinese New Year break, were you on the receiving end of the extended family's enthusiastic concern, or did you dodge all of it and go gallivanting abroad?

Figures released recently by the China Tourism Academy and Trip.com Group show that more than 6 million people from 242 Chinese cities successfully escaped the Spring Festival Gala, the deafening firecrackers and the rounds of visiting relatives for red envelopes, and spent the time instead in 85 countries with no "New Year flavor" to speak of.

Next to the 343 million people who traveled inside China, that outbound group is still not huge, but it grew 20% from the 2016 Chinese New Year holiday. And it spent more.

According to the 2017 Chinese New Year Travel Trends Report and Popularity Rankings, released jointly by the China Tourism Academy and Trip.com Group, per-person spending on outbound Chinese New Year travel was about 9,200 yuan in 2016. In 2017 it reached 10,000 yuan.

Sure enough, they chalk this up, as bluntly as ever, to "consumption upgrading" in outbound travel. People do have more money: National Bureau of Statistics data show that urban households' disposable income rose 165% between 2006 and 2015, to 31,195 yuan.

But spending more is only part of it. Travel abroad has become ordinary spending; "buy, buy, buy" has turned into "eat, eat, eat"; and finding a hotel you can lie around and have fun in now matters.

Popular destinations have shifted too — from the old Singapore-Malaysia-Thailand and Hong Kong-Macau-Taiwan circuits to Thailand, South Korea and Japan. A good share of travelers aren't going for the first time, so instead of watching a ladyboy show, many now sign up for a Thai cooking class.

Ever since the May Day break was cut to three days in 2008, Chinese New Year has mattered more and more as a golden week. More international routes, and friendlier visa policies toward Chinese passports in many countries, have made going abroad easy.

And Chinese New Year comes with more of a license to spend than any other holiday. No other time of year makes throwing money around feel so right.

So let's look at what has changed in this market, which young people drive. (Drawing on travel-market data from Trip.com Group, Alibaba's travel site Fliggy, Qyer and others.)

Abroad used to be novel wherever you went; now wherever you go, the point is to rest

Chinese New Year trips, at home or abroad, follow two ideas: head south to escape the cold, or head north to see snow. So it is no surprise that tropical Mauritius, the Maldives, Singapore and Australia sit on the same ranking of popular outbound destinations as Russia and Iceland, where there is nothing to see but ice and snow.

But put these Chinese New Year favorites next to the countries Chinese travelers liked best over all of 2016 and you can barely find a difference.

Behind that lie two things: several countries have loosened their visa rules, making it easy for travelers to come back next time; and a large group of people who have already been abroad now treat this kind of spending as normal.

So where everywhere abroad once felt novel, now people just want to find somewhere to relax, wherever that is.

From duty-free shopping sprees to eating and wandering

When we wrote about the Japanese brand Zojirushi, whose annual sales growth had stalled and whose duty-free sales had halved, we cited some related figures: over the previous year the number of Chinese tourists visiting Japan kept climbing to new highs, but per-person spending fell from 300,000 yen in early 2015 to 227,000 yen by the end of September 2016.

In Japan, more people are willing to spend on a hot-spring hotel with dinner and breakfast included, or on more obscure routes, rather than in big-city duty-free stores stacked with mass-market goods.

Take this breakdown of how a typical Japan-bound tourist's spending has changed, provided to QDaily by Trip.com Group: money going to restaurants and hotels has clearly risen, and what has been cut is exactly the "buy, buy, buy" budget Chinese tourists used to be keenest on.

"Compared with the old routine — sleep on the bus, get off and take photos, go into a shop and buy, buy, buy — outbound travelers today would rather spend on food, entertainment and lodging, to get closer to how local people live. Chinese tourists tend to pick this kind of holiday abroad: stay somewhere better, a luxury or distinctive high-end hotel; keep the schedule loose, without racing from place to place; eat better, at local specialty restaurants. And they save more on shopping and airfare," Trip.com Group said in an email answering QDaily's questions.

Forget the Singapore-Malaysia-Thailand package of a decade ago — now a single country is more than one trip can cover

Bring up the idea of "travel abroad" a dozen years ago and the seven-day Singapore-Malaysia-Thailand package for two, flights included, or a trip to Hong Kong Disneyland, would have been the best-selling product at just about every walk-in travel agency.

But domestic group tours — hauled around by bus for a glance at the main sights — were dropped without mercy long ago. So why should a mass-market product like "Europe, 10 countries in 11 days and 9 nights" still sell?

Zhou Zheng, vice president of Alibaba's travel platform Fliggy, said by phone that the best sellers on Fliggy are now holidays that go to a single popular country — Thailand or Japan — but cover three to five cities in one trip. "Destinations have gotten smaller, but the trips have gotten deeper."

And if the first trip was pleasant enough, going back to the same country to see other cities, or simply to switch off, is a good option too. As the Douban user @Aimin put it: "Since coming back from Japan I've settled my travel plans for the next five years: Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan."

No surprise: the top destinations shifted from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan to Thailand, South Korea and Japan

Right up to 2014, Hong Kong was mainland travelers' favorite Chinese New Year destination abroad. Thailand then took the title, and the top three shifted from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan to Thailand, South Korea and Japan.

Thailand, South Korea and Japan simply have far more places to wander through. And by Trip.com Group's email account, break the destinations down to cities and the flow runs from first-tier cities toward smaller, less obvious second- and third-tier ones. In Japan, beyond Tokyo, Osaka and Sapporo, more and more people are choosing Fukuoka, Nagoya, Aomori, Takamatsu, Shizuoka and Hida.

Thailand is young people's new starter trip abroad — why not Japan?

Not just at Chinese New Year: for the past two years Thailand has been the most popular destination abroad. By Zhou Zheng's account it has now replaced Hong Kong as many people's first stop outside the country.

For sheer range of things to see, Thailand and Japan are probably evenly matched, and on flying distance Japan has the edge.

But Thai visas are very easy to get and, more important, living costs there are low and service is fairly standardized, which many people read as excellent value. Hit films such as Lost in Thailand and Detective Chinatown did their bit to push the trend along.

Airlines have bet heavily on it. According to a data report from the global aviation research firm OAG, capacity on China-Thailand routes — measured by flight frequency and seat count — has grown at an average rate of 36% since 2011, the highest of any route between China and the rest of Asia, against 13% for South Korea and 10% for Japan.

"A few days in Southeast Asia" is now nearly as easy as a trip close to home

If the domestic travel market has had a push in recent years from the rising share of road trips and an ever-wider high-speed rail network, then how big the international travel market gets, and how far it reaches, is decided largely by the airlines.

For now, the big carriers are still putting most of their resources into nearby Southeast Asian countries. OAG's densely packed route map gives a rough sense of how eager they have been to open up this market.

In the year to August 2016, China added 241 international routes, many of them direct flights that once meant changing planes in Hong Kong, Singapore or elsewhere.

Asian routes account for 80% of the capacity on all international routes leaving China, and Southeast Asian routes make up a third of those — and grow the fastest, at an average of 21% a year.

If the whole family is going, an island is the least work — it suits young and old

By Trip.com Group's booking data, the average Chinese New Year 2017 booking covered 3.5 travelers, up 20% from a year earlier. Family trips are estimated to make up more than 60% of the total, and the share of people taking their parents abroad for the holiday has jumped, to more than 20% of all trips out of the country.

This has to do with changes in China's population and family structure: the effects of the family-planning policy have reached the travel market more than a decade on. With elderly parents above and small children below, many people pick an island. The ten most popular islands abroad over Chinese New Year were Phuket, Bali, Jeju, the Maldives, Boracay, Nha Trang, Sabah, Okinawa, Hawaii and Mauritius. Island trips accounted for about 30% of outbound Chinese New Year travel. Nha Trang in Vietnam alone, an island destination that has taken off only in recent years, drew an estimated 30,000 Chinese visitors over the holiday, Trip.com Group reckons — more than 80% of all the foreign tourists it received in that period.

Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are still the busiest departure points, but second- and third-tier cities have warmed up

Consumers in first-tier cities took to travel abroad earlier. Their spending power was already higher and they pick up information and new things faster, but it also comes down to the handful of established, large international airports in those cities. Nearly half of all outbound flight capacity still sits with the four airports of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

In 2016, though, another 56 airports put their capacity to work to meet the growing, more frequent demand from consumers in lower-tier cities. Their first choice, naturally, was still Southeast Asia: more than half of the new route capacity flying to Thailand, South Korea and Japan departs from airports in second- and third-tier cities.

And they are just as ready to spend. On Trip.com Group's ranking of per-person spending by departure city for Chinese New Year 2017, travelers leaving from Shanghai spent 10,380 yuan, first place, and Beijing 10,196 yuan, with Wuxi (9,521 yuan), Jinan (8,422 yuan) and Nanjing (8,282 yuan) in third, fourth and fifth.

Who plans a trip anymore? "Figure it out when we get there" — even at Chinese New Year

Travelers heading abroad used to put together a full plan in advance, tour guide or not; some printed it out to flip through on the road.

Now all that trouble has been handed to the phone: search Moments for popular sights, order tickets on mobile Taobao, find restaurants on a local review app, or the international version of Dianping. Plans change at the last minute? Search again for a day-trip product that takes no advance booking and lets you join a group on the spot.

Fliggy's data, together with what it told QDaily in an earlier interview: users once prepared for a trip abroad two months ahead on average; that shrank to 23 days in 2015 and 15 days in 2016. For nearer destinations, such as countries in the Asia-Pacific, a week is enough. And over this year's Chinese New Year holiday, 35% of spending on the platform came from orders users placed after they had already arrived.

"We assumed people would prepare more thoroughly for a trip over the long Chinese New Year holiday. Now it looks as though travel abroad has simply become a routine need for these users."

All the same, travel abroad is still niche spending — though it is probably addictive

The moment a long holiday comes around, half your Moments feed is lying on island beaches, chasing the northern lights in Scandinavia, wandering old towns in Southeast Asia or soaking in hot springs in the Japanese countryside. The outbound travel market looks like it is thriving — and even leaving aside the fact that people who travel abroad are fonder of showing off on Moments, that is a huge illusion.

For one thing, plenty of people still don't have the passport you need to leave. By Goldman Sachs' 2016 reading of Chinese consumers, only 4% of the population held a passport — fewer than 100 million people. And not until 2014 did the country's total outbound travel pass 100 million trips.

That is the headroom and the market opening travel companies see. Beyond the newcomers, the habit of going abroad once a year, or several times, is also taking hold. One figure Zhou Zheng offered: about 20% of the consumers they track went abroad last year and came back to buy a trip abroad again this year.

Do you have colleagues or friends who keep going back to Japan, Thailand or somewhere else? Given enough vacation days and a willingness to spend, going abroad is probably something you get hooked on.

Charts by Feng Xiuxia

Cover image from Pexels and PublicDomainPictures