Vacation consumption soars

Dragon Boat Festival spending may aid overall economic recovery, experts say

Consumption boomed in China on Thursday — the first day of Dragon Boat Festival holiday — benefiting the tourism, entertainment, transportation and catering sectors in particular, which experts said will help facilitate the country's economic recovery and growth.

Tourist destinations across the country were flooded with millions of visitors taking advantage of the three-day holiday, according to data released by various localities.

Shanghai, for instance, tallied more than 2.76 million visits on Thursday, while Zhejiang's provincial capital Hangzhou, home to the West Lake, registered 882,000 visits, data from local tourism departments showed.

Tourists also flocked to places such as Zibo, Shandong province, to enjoy its famed barbecue; Chengdu, Sichuan province, to see giant pandas; and Changbai Mountain, Jilin province, to escape the summer heat.

Xu Hongcai, deputy director of the economic policy committee at the China Association of Policy Sciences, said that the holiday travel spending spree is further evidence that the tourism sector is recovering after the country fine-tuned its COVID-19 response measures in January.

More importantly, the holiday tourist boom has shed light on the resilience and strength of the world's second-largest economy and will factor in the nation's overall economic recovery efforts this year, Xu said.

The flow of travelers put the country's extensive transportation network to the test. According to Flight Master, an intelligent travel services platform in China, 14,460 planes were operated nationwide on Thursday. Meanwhile, China State Railway Group said that the national railway system handled 16.2 million passenger trips.

"I would have liked to travel to any destination as long as I could secure a high-speed train ticket or a flight ticket at a relatively inexpensive price," said Zhang Liyang, a 29-year-old who works for a consulting company in Beijing.

However, Zhang failed to find cheaper train tickets — which are much more difficult to acquire as the public engages in intense competition to secure them during holidays — and flight tickets were over his budget. He chose to stay in Beijing instead and enjoy some films.

"As a movie buff, homegrown films released during the Dragon Boat Festival did not let me down, especially the crime thriller Lost in the Stars," he said, adding that he also watched another Chinese movie, Love Never Ends, which tells the story of two lonely, impoverished elderly lovers at the end of their lives.

According to movie data platform Maoyan, China's box office receipts from Thursday to Friday morning topped 400 million yuan ($55.7 million).

Furthermore, people have shown a stronger willingness to dine out for gatherings during the holiday as evidenced by data released by the Ministry of Commerce.

According to China UnionPay Merchant Services, food and beverage spending increased by more than 20 percent year-on-year in the past seven days.

Zhou Maohua, an analyst at China Everbright Bank, said that the government should roll out more policy measures, such as issuing discount coupons, to sustain robust consumption momentum after the holiday.

In the face of weakening external demand and sluggishness in the global economy, China needs to fully tap the potential of its domestic consumption to shore up its economic growth this year, he added.