Visitors take selfies at the booth of Universal Studios Beijing at the China International Travel Mart 2020 in Shanghai. File Photo: cnsphoto

Tickets for September 20, the first day Universal Studios Beijing is set to open to the public, were sold out within half an hour after the park opened ticket sales online at 12 am on Tuesday. 

Within half an hour, the tickets for the coming Mid-Autumn festival holiday which starts on Friday were sold out with so is the Universal Express Pass and the searches for the nearby hotels up by seven times, data from online travel booking platform revealed. 

According to Fliggy, Alibaba Group's online travel booking platform, within half an hour of open-ing, the official store of Universal Studio Beijing on the platform has sold 100, 000 tickets, while the store's followers also grew by150 percent over late August levels.

Data from travel platform Qunar showed that visits to the page of Universal Studio Beijing on the platform have grown 20 times in seconds after the opening with tickets and fast pass for the Mid-Autumn Festival period being sold out within half an hour. 

Ticket prices for Universal Studios Beijing range from 418 yuan ($65) to 748 yuan and tickets for the opening day are priced at 638 yuan. The Global Times found it was hard to access the booking page on the official app of Universal Studios Beijing as the system frequently collapsed, a result of too many users trying to book tickets at the same time.

According to Qunar, tickets for weekends and holiday were mainly booked by visitors with kids while younger consumers in their 20s prefer paid priority boarding services. 

Ticket sales were the major factor in driving the growth of the nearby hotels and flight tickets.

According to Qunar, the searches of hotel near Universal Studio Beijing increased more than seven times by12:30 am on Tuesday. 

The park’s grand opening falls on the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, the bookings of tickets heading to Beijing increased by more than 200 percent in the past week compared with the previous week, data from Fliggy showed.

According to media reports, the park will open to the public from 12:00 pm to 10:00 pm on Sep-tember 20. Visitors should schedule their arrival time in advance using the  park’s official app.

It is expected that the first phase project of the park will receive more than 10 million visits annually and after the completion of the third phase of the project, the park will host 30 million visits every year as the largest global theme park resort in the world, creating annual revenue of tens of billions of yuan, according to a forecast complied by the Tongzhou district government, the district in which the park is located.

Photo: Screenshot of the booking page on the official app of Universal Studios Beijing