People attend a lantern festival in Beijing to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. Photo: VCG

The Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on September 17 this year, has been the subject of many legends and poems in Chinese culture, making it one of the most romantic and poetic of holidays for Chinese people, and a driving force for tourism.

This year, night tours with moon viewing have become a hot item, with night flights and night cruises gaining more popularity among tourists, further boosting the "night economy."

Searches for domestic trips related to night tours in ancient towns and gardens in the past week increased by 77 percent month-on-month, while searches for night cruises increased by 42 percent month-on-month, data from Tongcheng Travel showed on Friday.  

As of September 5, the search volume for moon viewing flights has more than doubled month-on-month, with Shanghai and Guangzhou becoming popular destinations for such flights during the festival, said local service provider Meituan.

China Southern Airlines plans to operate nearly 3,300 flights on more than 370 routes for the moon viewing, and Spring Airlines will carry out more than 200 moon-viewing flights for three consecutive days from September 15th to September 17.

Chinese traditional culture has also attracted the interest of many foreigners. Serge Mitrofanov, a Russian student from Beijing Foreign Studies University, said that he plans to visit the classical gardens in Suzhou, East China's Jiangsu Province with his roommate to experience the romance of Chinese culture.

"Moon-viewing tours and temple fairs are very new things to me. I will experience the city's culture while city walking," he said. 

The travel surge is set to further boost China's consumption recovery. Official data showed that China's retail sales of consumer goods went up 2.7 percent year-on-year to nearly 3.78 trillion yuan ($532.8 billion) in July. Services consumption stood out as a bright spot, with retail sales of services expanding 7.2 percent from a year ago in the first seven months of 2024.

The combination of night tours and Chinese culture is creating a rich atmosphere, as night tours can be deeply integrated with local characteristics, which will help boost vitality and the "night economy," Song Ding, a research fellow from the China Development Institute, told the Global Times on Friday. 

The booming "night economy" is also prompting more investment enthusiasm from enterprises. Chen Xi, vice president of Rokid, a Hangzhou-based tech startup, said at the ongoing China International Fair for Trade in Services in Beijing that the company is making efforts to build a "night economy" with augmented reality technology. 

"We have created some treasure hunting games with the help of AR technology in the context of local culture. Such games will help kids enjoy traveling more," Chen said.