Chinese consumer market rebounds

"I went to Xi'an and Fuzhou during this year's Spring Festival holiday. The number of tourists is rising compared with those in the past two years,” said Miss Ma, who lives in Beijing, adding she queued for more than an hour in some restaurants. Now Ma is preparing for a trip to Spain as the Covid control has been loosened.

According to the data center of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of China, the number of domestic tourism trips has reached 308 million during this year's Spring Festival holiday, an increase of 23.1% year on year.

With the domestic tourism revenue reaching 375.843 billion yuan, the festival numbers of trips and revenue this year have recovered to 88.6% and 73.1% of those in 2019.

Economic data showed the Spring Festival has seen the demand of consumers for dining, accommodation, travel, shopping and entertainment fully unleashed. The holiday economy is getting more prosperous.

As cultural tourism is enjoying a recovery, night activities and tourist consumption have been highlighted as well.

During the Spring Festival, 56 merchants in Jincheng city, north China’s Shanxi province, jointly held the First International Lantern Show.

Meanwhile, the gourmet bazaar, Chinese cuisines, online snacks and others were rolled out for tourists.

"Consumption is the end of the domestic circulation and the strong demand for consumption will stimulate the supply," said Pan Helin, a researcher at Zhejiang University's International Joint Business School.

During the Spring Festival holiday, the tourism market in Hainan province picked up, and provincial duty-free market continued to boom, showing Hainan attraction to the international consumers.

Haikou Customs in the province witnessed a total of 1.56 billion yuan of offshore duty-free shopping, an increase of 5.88% compared with the same period in 2022.

The Taibai Lake new district in north China’s Shandong province launched consumer vouchers valuing 1,175,400 yuan, resulting in a consumption of about 4.3 million yuan.
Sichuan province gave out more than 74 million yuan "gift packages" to stimulate the cultural tourism consumption.

The tourist spending of this festival on 2023 has accounted for 34.77% of the province's overall consumption, an increase of 3.62% compared to 2022.

Nighttime consumption reached 5.253 billion yuan, an year-on-year increase of 40.27%. It accounted for 28.83% of the provincial total.

Source: People’s Daily; Trans-editing by Wang Yunya