Photo: CFP

 
A tourist who arrived at Sanxingdui Museum in Southwest China's Sichuan Province at 8 am, ahead of the opening, queued for more than one hour to enter, which was an vivid miniature of the first day of the May Day holidays on social media platform Xiaohongshu.

Such travel mania was seen nationwide on Saturday, the first day of the five-day holidays. Air, sea and land passenger traffic surged 151.8 percent year-on-year on Saturday, latest statistics revealed. 

A total of 19.661 million railway passenger trips were made on Saturday with 12,064 passenger trains operating, which made a new high in terms of single-day passenger traffic, according to China Railway on Sunday. The railway operator estimated that 18 million passenger trips will be made on Sunday, with 11,217 trains scheduled to run.

Local authorities of a number of cities and provinces also released local travel statistics for the first day of the holiday.

Beijing welcomed 1.841 million tourists on Saturday, doubling 2022 levels. Sales revenues reached 107 million yuan ($15.5 million), an increase of 180 percent year-on-year, which tied the revenues in 2019. Shanghai received 3.062 million travelers on Saturday.

More than 30,000 visited the Universal Studios Beijing on Saturday, and the number is expected to increase in following days with more than 75 percent of tourists come from cities and provinces outside Beijing, according to media reports. 

For South China's Guangdong Province, its 150 key scenic spots received 2.21 million tourists on Saturday, up 80.1 percent year-on-year. Expressway traffic in Guangdong reached a record high of 9.12 million vehicle trips on Saturday, according to official statistics released on Sunday.

Some 3.618 million travelers visited Sichuan, up 67.61 percent from 2022, with ticket sales reaching 32.34 million yuan, up 119.34 percent year-on-year.

Changsha in Central China's Hunan Province reported a year-on-year growth of 909 percent for travel order on Saturday. First-day hotel bookings increased 685 percent year-on-year, while scenic spot ticket sales increased 724 percent.

The metro network in Wuhan, Central China's Hubei Province, recorded 5.06 million passenger trips on Saturday, a record high. The well-known scenic spot Yellow Crane Tower said on Sunday that ticket sales have been suspended, as the number of visitors who have made reservations for it has reached 90 percent of its maximum capacity. 

Driven by resurgent enthusiasm for travel, China's consumer market boomed sharply during the holidays.

China's key retail and catering enterprises saw sales growth of 21.4 percent year-on-year on Saturday, according to the monitoring of the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) released on Sunday.

Catering and leisure consumption increased significantly, with sales of key catering enterprises up 36.9 percent on a yearly basis. Sales of clothing, shoes and hats, gold, silver and jewelry, tobacco and alcohol all increased by about 20.9 percent, 17.6 percent, 17.4 percent and 16.8 percent, all on year-on-year basis, MOFCOM data showed.

In particular, on-site consumption saw a significant growth during the May Day holidays.

On Saturday, the box office reached 294 million yuan, with 464,000 screenings attracting an audience of 7.26 million, according to statistics sent to the Global Times on Sunday from Maoyan, a box-office tracking site.

The number of buyers to Suning's stores across the country on Saturday increased by 32 percent year-on-year, with the volume of orders spiked 47 percent, Chinese retailer Suning said in a note sent to the Global Times on Sunday.

The tourism industry estimated that the 2023 May Day holidays will be the biggest in over four years. A total of 240 million trips are expected to be made during the holidays, which tops that in 2019, with tourism revenues expected to reach 120 billion yuan, according to the China Tourism Academy.

Global Times