Visitors watch fish swimming in a pond in Yu Garden, an extensive Chinese garden located in Shanghai on Friday. Photo: Yang Hui/GT

China kicked off its five-day May Day holiday on Friday, the first long holiday in the country following the outbreak of COVID-19 in January. Despite strict virus-prevention measures still in place, the hard-hit tourism sector is expected to recover thanks to the rising enthusiasm of tourists.

Tourists told the Global Times on Friday that they are excited to take the small holiday going out to realize their traveling plan, which was set for the Spring Festival holidays in January but later canceled due to the COVID-19 epidemic.

The Palace Museum, one of Beijing's major attractions, reopened on Friday after a 97-day closure. Tourists that have booked online tickets need to scan a health code to activate their tickets before entry.

Automatic forehead temperature testing machines are also located at the entrance.

In order to control visitor traffic, the Palace Museum has adopted a ticket-booking system with a daily limit of 5,000 visitors. All the tickets for May 1 to May 5 quickly sold out when booking began on Wednesday.

West Lake, the famous tourist attraction in Hang-zhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang Province, also kicked off the real-name appointment booking system during the holiday to control the traffic.

Xu Ning, a tourist from Northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, told the Global Times on Friday that she could not enter the Leifeng Pagoda, a five-story tall tower located on the south of the West Lake due to lack of appointment in advance.

"We want to taste local food like the steamed bun and Hangzhou-style duck," Xu said, noting she also plans to visit Wuzhen, one of the famous ancient water towns in Zhejiang after the capital city.

Si Zuo, a Beijing-based white-collar worker, ar-rived in Hangzhou on Friday morning by the high-speed rail train. 

Apart from visiting West Lake, Si told the Global Times that he was not worried about traveling as the nation has contained the virus spread to a large extent. "We take necessary goods like disinfectant with us the whole day outside while wearing the mask."

In Shanghai, the tourism boom has returned on the first day of the holiday. Scenic points like Nanjing Road, the Bund, and City God Temple in Shanghai saw more tourists. 

A female visitor surnamed Duan, who came from Kunming, capital of Southwest China's Yunnan Province, told the Global Times Friday that she had wanted to visit Shanghai earlier this year but later canceled the plan when the virus was worrisome.

Now she would like to take a holiday with five of her friends to spend a week in Shanghai for sight-seeing.

Following Beijing's move to lower its emergency response status from level one to level two on Thursday, tourism orders boomed, according to online travel service platforms.

Searches and reservations for Beijing trips, car rentals and tickets for scenic spots for the May Day holiday period have reached a peak since April, according to China's largest online travel agency Trip.com Group, formerly known as Ctrip.

The bookings for round-trip air tickets from and to Beijing increased 400 percent over the same period last week, data from online travel website mafengwo.com showed Thursday.

Given the mutual recognition of health codes between Beijing, Tianjin and North China's Hebei Province, tours around Beijing also witnessed a keyword search surge: keywords such as "self-driving tours to Hebei" went up 166 percent compared with last week.

China received a total of 23.2 million domestic tourists on the first day of the May Day holidays, generating tourism revenue worth around 9.8 billion yuan ($1.4 billion), according to the calculation of China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Luo Shugang, the Culture and Tourism Minister, told a briefing on Thursday that nearly 70 percent of China's tourist attractions have reopened and visitors should not exceed 30 percent of an attraction's maximum capacity due to COVID-19.

China's state-owned railway operator China Railway estimated 7.2 million train trips for Friday, according to a report by thepaper.cn.

The Chinese Ministry of Transport (MOT) forecasts that 117 million trips will be made during the May Day holidays, with inter-city short-distance travel dominating. Total passengers via railway, highway and civil aviation, however, will be 30-40 percent of normal levels during small holidays, an MOT spokesperson told a press conference on Thursday.

Wuhan, the city hardest hit by the COVID-19 in China, has risen to the top spot on tourists' lists of the site they most want to visit, according to a report the Tourism Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences released Tuesday.

Beijing ranked No.1 on the list prior to the outbreak, said the report.

While tourism is heating up, measures to check the spread of coronavirus have not been loosened.

At a conference on Thursday, Chinese authorities urged travelers and institutions to maintain thorough COVID-19 prevention and control measures during the five-day holidays.

Epidemic control measures for transportation, hotels and tourist spots should be further specified and strictly enforced to guard against the increased risk of large gatherings of tourists.