AS COVID-19 has been successfully brought under control in China and the vaccination rate is rising steadily, the five-day May Day holiday has witnessed strong domestic demand for tourism.

Public anxiety over COVID-19 has been eased thanks to the clearance of at-risk areas across the country and the popularization of vaccines, and more Chinese tourists have chosen to go further beyond their cities and provinces.

Per data provided by multiple online travel platforms, inter-provincial tours have become popular.

During the holiday, inter-provincial orders accounted for 77 percent of the total, according to Chinese homestay booking platform Xiaozhu.com.

Nearly 90 percent of car rental bookings for May Day travel have been for inter-provincial use, with Sanya, Chengdu and Haikou being the three most popular destinations, while Xinjiang and Tibet are seeing skyrocketing orders, according to Chinese travel services provider Trip.com.

Passenger traffic in and out of Beijing hit a new record May 1. On the national scale, the number of civil aviation passengers April 30 significantly exceeded the number seen during the same period in 2019, with domestic routes increasing by more than 20 percent over the same period in 2019.

Industry analysts said that the domestic air transport volume during the holiday has exceeded the pre-epidemic level and is likely to register a record high.

The Wanshou Palace cultural block in Nanchang, capital of East China’s Jiangxi Province, has issued multiple warnings to limit numbers of tourists as the scenic spot saw an average daily inflow of 100,000 tourists from May 1 to May 3.

The Beijing Badaling Great Wall has strictly implemented its online real-name booking system and restricted the number of tourists during the holiday.

Shanghai received over 10.3 million tourists in the first three days of the May Day holiday. Compared with the same period in 2020, cultural and tourism consumption has increased significantly and even exceeded the May Day holiday in 2019 in some areas, according to the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism.

As the Communist Party of China celebrates its centenary this year, revolutionary sites across the country have been popular during the May Day holiday.

In Shaoshan, Hunan Province, 85,000 people visited the former residence of the late Chairman Mao Zedong on May 2. It was the third most popular tourist site in the province on that day.

From May 1 to May 3, red tourism sites in Jiangxi’s Ganzhou City received 1.59 million tourists, generating a total income of 1 billion yuan (U$154 million), per a count from the city’s cultural and tourism bureau. (Xinhua)