More Than a Quarter of Chinese People Traveled Over Spring Festival. How Did They Spend 536.8 Billion Yuan?

Spring Festival is just about the only holiday that stretches this youth-driven market to every age group. And it invites splurging.

"Wherever they go they can't wait to share photos of themselves on social media, which goads and inspires their compatriots to join the global 'invasion'..." A recent Bloomberg story said Chinese tourists are "taking over" the earth.

Look at the appetite for travel people let loose over the Spring Festival holiday just past, and that doesn't sound like an exaggeration. According to data from Trip.com Group, travelers from 230 cities went to more than 70 countries and over 800 cities around the world during the holiday.

Spring Festival is just about the only holiday that stretches this youth-driven market to every age group. As the idea that you don't have to spend New Year at home spreads, more and more people are traveling over the holiday. The numbers from the various travel platforms and agencies — Trip.com Group, Tongcheng, Fliggy, the China National Tourism Administration — don't quite agree with one another, but they all point the same way.

Once travel stopped being a lifestyle and simply became part of life, where you go turned into a new marker of distinction. Broadly speaking, a trip abroad always carries more of an adventurous air than one at home, and most of the time it says something about money too. Trip.com Group's data shows about 6.5 million outbound trips over Spring Festival, up 8.3% year on year; at an average 9,500 yuan a head, that handed roughly 61.75 billion yuan to the rest of the world.

Domestic travel grew faster. CNTA data puts the holiday at 386 million domestic visitor trips, up 12.1% year on year. Spending per person was far less impressive than on trips abroad — just 1,230 yuan — but the total rose 12.6%, to 475 billion yuan.

Roughly estimated, then, about 28% of Chinese people traveled over Spring Festival, and they spent close to 536.8 billion yuan.

Spring Festival matters more and more as a golden week, though in sheer size the holiday just past still lost to the October 2017 National Day golden week on domestic travel: over those 8 days last year the country logged 705 million domestic visitor trips and 583.6 billion yuan in tourism revenue. On outbound travel, Spring Festival came out ahead — by 500,000 trips.

And this is a holiday that indulges spending, so even people who stay put don't stint on food and drink. The Ministry of Commerce counted about 926 billion yuan in sales at retail and catering businesses nationwide between New Year's Eve and the sixth day of the lunar new year, up 10.2% year on year.

We pulled together numbers from several travel platforms and third-party research firms to work out how that 536.8 billion yuan was spent, and how the way people travel has changed.

Geopolitics knocked last year's two hottest destinations, South Korea and Taiwan, out of the top ten

As last year, the most popular countries to visit were Thailand and Japan. Trip.com Group counted more than 500,000 Chinese tourists heading to the two of them over the holiday.

Thailand, the first stop abroad for many travelers, has plenty to see, easy visas, low prices and fairly consistent service. Japan was popular already, and looser visa rules — three-year multiple entry — have brought in more and more Chinese tourists.

2018 Spring Festival Golden Week Travel and Consumption Review (《2018 春节黄金周旅游与出行消费盘点》), published jointly by Tongcheng International Travel and Tongcheng-eLong, says that nearby destinations such as Japan and Thailand have held their lead in visitor numbers while also building in-depth itineraries and more specialized niche products to bring Chinese tourists back for a second and third visit — skiing in Hokkaido, say, or taking a Thai massage certification course. Repeat customers to both places are multiplying.

Further down the rankings, the shifts were less straightforward.

Compared with last year, both South Korea and Taiwan fell out of the top ten. Geopolitics explains both.

The THAAD dispute pushed relations between China and South Korea to their lowest point; group tours there were cancelled almost entirely, and only started to come back last December. According to South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Tourism Organization, roughly 80,000 to 92,000 Chinese tourists visited over Spring Festival 2018, against about 150,000 in the same period a year earlier — a drop of nearly half. Most of the missing visitors went to Southeast Asian countries and islands instead.

Politics hit travel to Taiwan too: after Tsai Ing-wen took office in 2016, relations across the strait entered a cooling-off period, and Taiwan dropped out of the top ten Spring Festival destinations abroad. Mainland visits to Taiwan peaked in 2015 at 4.18 million and have fallen at double-digit rates for two years running; Taiwan's Tourism Bureau counted 2.71 million mainland tourists in 2017.

More people want to go farther, and long-haul markets like the US, Australia and New Zealand all did well

Either stay close to home, or take a few extra days of annual leave and go somewhere far: that is how many people plan a Spring Festival trip. Plenty of those who go abroad go a long way, since National Day and Spring Festival are the only two long public holidays of the year.

In this market defined as "long-haul," Europe has recovered somewhat — 6% of travelers went there, with Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic and Austria drawing crowds, and Italy entering the top ten for the first time. Fewer terrorist attacks in Europe lately may have something to do with it. The US took 3% of travelers, Australia and New Zealand 4%.

A report from Trip.com Group and the China Tourism Academy adds that twice as many people signed up for Antarctic trips this year as last, even at an enormous price — 160,000 yuan a head. Bookings for aurora-watching routes in Northern Europe and Canada grew more than 150% year on year. Destinations once called niche are not so niche anymore.

An easy visa — or no visa at all — is also a powerful lure. The United Arab Emirates, which went visa-free this year, saw its Spring Festival departures "sell out" a full month ahead.

Sichuan took in more domestic visitors than any other province, and earned the most from them

Domestic trips grew about 12%, faster than outbound travel's 8%. Which provinces did the people who left home but not the country head for?

By the CNTA Data Center's count, Sichuan was the most popular domestic destination on both tourism revenue and visitor numbers. It has been a Spring Festival favorite for years: it led on both counts in 2016 as well.

Besides the tourism assets nature handed it, Sichuan had clear weather over the holiday and better roads and public facilities, which helped. Xie Haiyin, a deputy inspector at the Sichuan Provincial Tourism Development Commission, told Sichuan Daily that 16 cities and prefectures in the province each took in more than 1 billion yuan in total tourism revenue over the holiday. Mount Emei, the giant panda breeding research base, Wuhou Shrine and Dujiangyan all drew crowds.

Chengdu alone received 15.755 million domestic and overseas visitors, earning 14.03 billion yuan in tourism revenue, up 27.4% year on year.

Guangzhou, first in tourism revenue last year, slipped to second this year, with Hubei third. As last year, 15 provinces and municipalities cleared 10 billion yuan; besides the top ten in the chart, Henan, Jiangxi, Liaoning, Hainan and Heilongjiang also passed 10 billion yuan this year. In 2016, only five provinces cleared 10 billion yuan in Spring Festival tourism revenue — which says that over these two years more people have chosen to travel inside China at New Year, and to spend more while doing it.

Family trips are the mainstream, islands are still the favorite, and Hong Kong shows signs of a comeback

As in past years, family trips dominated Spring Festival travel.

Trip.com Group's data shows that China's ever larger middle class treats a New Year trip with the family as a way to honor parents and reward children: trips with kids made up 34%, trips with parents 15%.

Singapore was the destination families with children liked best — half the travelers who went there were on family trips. Many of those taking parents along were unmarried adult children who can now afford it. Trip.com Group's 2018 Spring Festival Filial Travel Report (《2018 春节孝亲旅游报告》) says the share of people who took their parents traveling at New Year was up a tenth from last year, and spending per person rose 10% as well. Children, in other words, are more willing to spend on a trip with their parents, and they increasingly pick independent travel or high-quality, no-shopping tour groups.

With aging parents above and small children below, warm and easygoing islands remained most people's choice. Island trips accounted for 40% of travel abroad.

That is easy to understand: nine of the ten most popular islands — Phuket, Bali, Nha Trang, Boracay and Sabah among them — lie outside China. The only Chinese entry in the top ten, Sanya, was also the most popular destination at home.

Vietnam aside, eight of the ten islands cost more on average over the holiday than Sanya did (6,240 yuan a head).

Hong Kong, a favorite gradually displaced by Thailand and Japan after 2014, also won back some of its pull this year. The industry credits the rising yuan-to-Hong-Kong-dollar rate for warming mainlanders to the trip.

Figures from the Hong Kong Immigration Department show more than 1.06 million mainland visitors over the holiday, up 14.5% year on year. For comparison, visitors from other countries and regions grew only about 1.6% across the seven days.

The Winter Olympics has put more people on skis

This is the third Spring Festival since Beijing won the right to host the Winter Olympics, and state policy and market appetite are starting to show: ice-and-snow tourism in China has grown at double-digit rates three years running. Heilongjiang, Jilin, Beijing and Hebei form its core belt.

According to CNTA figures, the Vanke Songhua Lake resort in Jilin received 33,500 visitors over the holiday, up 35.63% year on year, and the Beidahu resort 22,100, up 30%.

Most Chinese people used to think of winter sports as an expensive experience. After the Olympic bid succeeded, the government began pushing them hard, capital poured in, and hundreds of new ski resorts are going up around the country. The China Ski Industry White Paper (《中国滑雪产业白皮书》) counts 703 ski areas in China today, more than twice the 2011 number.

Set against China's tourism market as a whole, though, snow travel is still a sliver. For most visitors skiing is a first try, and some spend far longer posing for photos and editing them than on the slopes. Turning that into a lasting habit will take years of cultivation, and the facilities and services around it still need upgrading.

With Pyeongchang closed, the 2022 Winter Olympics has formally moved to Beijing time. It is safe to predict that snow travel will keep gaining over the next three Spring Festivals.

Self-drive trips exploded, whether abroad or on independent trips at home

In a report from the China Tourism Academy and Trip.com Group, independent travel and package tours split domestic trips roughly 48:52 this Spring Festival.

Among independent travelers, notably, the number who drove themselves nearly doubled year on year, reaching 48.5%. Train and plane tickets are hard to get at New Year, which may be why some travelers on short and medium trips took their own cars or rented one.

Besides red-hot Sanya, Chengdu was one of the biggest destinations for renting and driving: many people picked up cars at Shuangliu Airport for Mount Qingcheng, Dujiangyan and Xiling Snow Mountain nearby. Sichuan Daily reports that self-drive trips made up 73.3% of the more than 70 million visitors Sichuan received this holiday.

More cars on the road, more people with licenses, and rental companies and online travel agencies teaching people the habit of renting all seem to be moving the self-drive market along.

Figures from the Traffic Management Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security put China's car fleet at 217 million in 2017, up 11.85% from 2016. More people can drive, too: 385 million licensed drivers in 2017, up 7.9% year on year.

The market for driving abroad is growing as well. The 2017 China Internet Overseas Car Rental Industry White Paper (《中国互联网境外租车行业白皮书 2017》), from Zuzuche and Analysys International, says 4.07 million people drove themselves abroad in 2016, or 3.34% of all outbound trips — 29 times the 140,000 people (0.14% of outbound trips) who did so in 2013. Driving is especially popular in countries like the US, which is vast, thinly populated and well supplied with roads. Trip.com Group told QDaily that half of Chinese tourists traveling independently in the US choose to drive.

Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou still send the most travelers, but enthusiasm in second- and third-tier cities is growing astonishingly fast

Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou took the top three spots for travel appetite. More surprising: Suzhou and Yinchuan took the top two for spending per person on trips abroad, at 12,114 yuan and 11,411 yuan, with Beijing and Shanghai behind them.

Besides Suzhou, well-off cities in Jiangsu and Zhejiang such as Wuxi, Hangzhou and Nanjing also made the top ten for spending per person, along with Zhengzhou and Shenyang. Trip.com Group and the China Tourism Academy put the average price paid for outbound package tours and independent travel products over the holiday at 9,500 yuan.

On domestic spending, Tongcheng International Travel and Trip.com Group are close: "more than 3,500 yuan" and "close to 4,000 yuan" a head, both higher than in previous years. Each figure comes from the platform's own orders, and both differ considerably from the CNTA's 1,230 yuan cited earlier.

UnionPay data shows Chinese tourists covered more of the world over Spring Festival 2018. Travelers from first-tier cities reached 100 countries and regions, but the number of destinations grew faster for travelers from 15 "new first-tier" cities such as Chengdu, Hangzhou, Wuhan and Chongqing, which added 11 countries and regions in 2018 — they could well pass the first-tier cities by Spring Festival 2019.

Chinese travelers now out-travel everyone, with 20% of the world's outbound tourism spending — twice the second-place US

China has become the country that travels most. According to the latest figures from the UN World Tourism Organization, Chinese tourists account for more than a fifth of what the world's outbound travelers spend, twice the second-place United States — and that is only the 2016 number.

CLSA expects Chinese tourists to spend US$429 billion abroad by 2021. As with Japan in the 1980s, a growing national economy sends citizens out wandering. Mastercard's data suggests emerging countries in the Asia-Pacific will add more than 50 million new outbound tourists within five years.

Douglas Quinby, a travel analyst based in Atlanta, argues that China's lead in mobile apps has helped Chinese travelers pick up the craft of travel quickly, and that independent, self-directed travelers are displacing package tours.

There is still a great deal of room to grow. Outbound trips reached 129 million for all of 2017, yet only about 5% of Chinese people hold a passport. Roughly 10 million apply for a new one every year, so more and more Chinese people will travel abroad — and to a wider spread of places.

Asia as a whole is now the world's second-largest source of tourists. Visa's data counts at least 178 airports being built or expanded across the Asia-Pacific.

Barring surprises, it is safe to predict that this market will keep booming for a while yet.

Charts: Feng Xiuxia

Cover image from Visualhunt and Wikipedia