The Year of the Dragon started on 10 February, kicking off the 15-day Chinese holiday called Spring Festival. However, with preparations starting ahead of the New Year, the travel period around the festival, called “chun yun”, already started on 26 January in China and lasts for 40 days.
Last year, the Spring Festival came too soon after the scrapping of the zero-Covid policy and amid a new wave of infections for people to return to their travel habits, but this year, with travel back in full force, not only are the Chinese expected to make 9 billion domestic trips during the travel period, but they are also going back on holidays abroad.
Thailand, one of the most popular destinations for the Chinese pre-Covid, is expecting to welcome between 200,000 and 250,000 Chinese tourists during the holiday period, more than three times over 2023 levels, said Chanapan Kaewklachaiyawuth, vice president of the Thai Chinese Tourism Alliance Association. Over the course of the year, Thailand hopes to get back 75% of the number of Chinese visitors it had in 2019. If the 8 million tourists expected in 2024 materialise, it will be more than double the number of last year.
A little closer to home, Vietnamese border cities have already started seeing the surge in Chinese tourists. “Inbound and outbound tourists have been surging recently because of the Spring Festival, the number reaching a maximum of nearly 25,000 in a single day”, said Li Min, deputy director of the immigration inspection station in Dongxing, a city on the China-Vietnam border in Guangxi.
Preparing for the increased demand, airlines added extra routes for the Lunar New Year travel period. China Eastern added 15 new international routes, focused especially on Southeast Asia island destinations. The airline plans to operate 2,322 round-trip flights between various Chinese airports and Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok during chun yun. Among the new routes are also connections between Shanghai Pudong Airport and Australia’s Cairns and Perth. The airline has also increased the frequency of some of the popular routes, between Shanghai and Sydney, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and the Maldives.
Europe is also bound to see an increase in arrivals, according to Hainan Airlines’ Berlin office. The Chinese New Year holiday has stimulated an increase in the passenger rate for the airline’s Beijing to Berlin flight in February compared to January, according to Chinese state media agency Xinhua. Currently, the Beijing to Berlin direct flight operated by Hainan Airlines has resumed to pre-pandemic levels, with three flights per week during the winter-spring season, however, encouraged by an over 80% seat occupancy rate in February, the airline plans to add two more weekly flights from April.
