Golden Week 2024: Chinese tourists skip Tokyo for these visa-free destinations

More Chinese are headed to Europe and other far-flung hotspots during the Golden Week holiday that sees hundreds of millions in the country on the move, in the most robust signs of a travel rebound since the country re-opened its borders.
Bookings for overseas flights and hotels have spiked from last year’s holiday week, with international flight reservations doubling and Europe showing some of the the biggest growth, according to Qunar and Trip.com, among the biggest online travel agencies in China. Overseas car rental bookings have surged by more than 150% from 2023, while cruise vacations have spiked seven-fold, according to Fliggy, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s travel unit.
Asian destinations from Japan to Malaysia are favored during the week-long holiday that starts Oct. 1, while some of the fastest-growing bookings are to long-haul spots including Belgium, Croatia, Nordic countries as well as the United Arab Emirates.
“We expect an October Golden Week that will come closer than any previous Chinese holiday period since the country’s reopening to meeting pre-pandemic levels,” according to a report by Dragon Trail International, which tracks travel sentiment and trends in the country.
The recovery of overseas tourism from China is a critical metric for the global travel industry. Chinese holidaymakers, known for outspending tourists from most other countries before the pandemic, made 170 million trips abroad in 2019 and spent almost 1.7 trillion yuan ($242 billion) — making up 14% of global tourism spending, according to World Travel and Tourism Council data.
While international travel from China hasn’t fully recovered, airlines have allocated about 1.6 million seats on overseas flights from the mainland for Oct. 1 through Oct. 7 — about 20% below pre-pandemic levels, according to a Bloomberg analysis of Cirium flight data. Meanwhile, air ticket data from flight analytics firm ForwardKeys shows an even smaller gap for flight demand compared to 2019. Growth to some overseas destinations, particularly those with visa-free policies, is particularly striking, said Nan Dai, China market analyst at ForwardKeys.
Malaysia’s capital city of Kuala Lumpur has seen a 142% increase in visitors compared to pre-pandemic levels, as well as double-digit growth to Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore where visa-free initiatives have boosted tourism, according to ForwardKeys.
With over-tourism a challenge in many hotspot locales, Chinese tourists are shifting from big group tours to solo or couple trips to less-trafficked locations during this holiday. Japanese cities including Yokohama, Takayama and Ito — less popular than the Tokyo-Osaka-Kyoto circuit — have shown triple-digit booking growth, according to Trip.com. Nature and wellness holidays are also on the rise, with Phu Quoc island in Vietnam as well as the hot spring town of Higashizu in Japan seeing a surge in demand.
Still, most of the travel will be on the mainland, where domestic tourism has rebounded strongly. Shuozhou in the northern province of Shanxi, as well as other cities in the province, have become hot destinations after the hit video game Black Myth: Wukong featured the region’s stunning scenery, pagodas and temples.
China expects domestic trips and tourist spending in the first nine months of 2024 to rise 16.8% and 17.1% on-year, respectively, inching closer to full-year 2019 level, according to an official briefing on Monday. Inbound visitor numbers are expected to surge to 95 million in the first three quarters of the year, a level representing 93.4% of the same period in 2019.
Authorities are also mulling supporting concerts, sports events and popular TV series as a means to boost tourism, officials said at the same briefing. Some local governments will also offer tourists millions of yuan worth of coupons to boost consumption.
Despite a sluggish economy and constrained consumer spending, Chinese on holiday are expected to make 1.94 billion trips on the mainland during the Golden Week — more trips than the number of citizens in the country, according to the government. That’ll be a nearly 20% jump over the same period in 2019.
Even as Cirium data showed airlines have scheduled about 17 million seats on domestic routes, up 22% from 2019, many more will be driving or using high-speed rail. The government estimates that eight out of 10 trips will be made by car.