Passengers walk out of Haikou Meilan International Airport on December 9, 2022. Photo: VCG

Domestic travel sees a rebound with the number of passenger flights reaching nearly 80 percent of the same period last year amid the booming demand for distant travel as the nation is optimizing its epidemic control policies.

Beijing Capital International Airport and Beijing Daxing International Airport, the two major airports of the country's capital, have reported basically the same number of flights on Sunday. 

The Beijing Capital International Airport planned to make 447 inbound and outbound flights, transporting 38,600 passengers, while the Daxing airport planned to have 306 inbound and outbound flights, according to CCTV news.

Based on the national civil aviation data, from December 7 to December 20, the actual number of domestic passenger flights was 89,000 or nearly 80 percent of the same period last year, the report said.

Since the beginning of December, the number of domestic flights has gradually recovered from an average of less than 3,000 per day to the same level as last year for the same period. 

The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) recently issued a scheme for guiding the resumption of aviation services in a safe and orderly manner, which played an important role in injecting the momentum for the speedy recovery. 

The scheme requests all domestic airline companies to comprehensively adopt the optimized epidemic control policies while meeting the public demand for travel, especially during the upcoming Chinese New Year.

A gradual recovery of the domestic aviation market is expected, in the light of the scheme issued by the CAAC, suggesting that the average daily passenger flight volume will return to 70 percent of the pre-epidemic level in early January next year.