For most car owners in China, a driving tour with family members during the May Day holiday golden week is their first choice. Relevant data show that among tourists from big and medium-size cities, approximately 30% prefer driving their own cars on a tour. In Beijing, 53% of tourists choose to travel by their own vehicles.

For most Chinese farmers, however, traveling in holidays remains a luxury nowadays. During golden weeks, they are able to free themselves from heavy work, having dinner and going shopping with friends and relatives, and buying some cheap clothes. Ms Liao from Sichuan Province is now the nurse of a three-year-old boy of a Swedish couple in Beijing. She hopes her Swedish employers would go back Sweden to spend their holidays during this May 1 golden week, so that she could return to her hometown in Sichuan. She has not been home for years due to overly high traveling expenses.

As an increasingly large number of foreigners are working and living in China, some of them also travel during China's golden weeks, and some Europeans working in China complain that the holidays are not enough. A French lady from the France Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai indicated that since she arrived in China, she could only have long holidays during the Spring Festival, May Day holiday and National Day holiday like ordinary Chinese. She also has ten extra days of annual leave, while she usually misses them because of insufficient workforce. She used to have eight-week holidays in France, hence she complained that she could go nowhere as a seven-day leave was really too short.