China’s first test of travel demand after its COVID-19 outbreak was the long Tomb Sweeping Day weekend, but rather than hopping on an airplane or train, Shan Mingyu and five of her family drove to a resort town close to her eastern home of Yixing, Jiangsu Province.
“We did not want to travel too far away and we did not want to take public transport,” said the 22-year-old student, who spent about a month cooped up at home during China’s lockdown to rein in the virus.
“At the resort, we booked a villa so the whole family could stay together. We even brought a bottle of ethanol to sterilize the place,” she said.
Photo: Reuters
The global tourism industry is closely watching trends in China for clues to travel patterns in other major markets once the virus is under control and curbs on movement are lifted.
Shan’s family is not alone in its caution even as China, where the pandemic originated late last year, pulls the virus situation under control, data from Ctrip, run by online travel giant Trip.com Group, showed.
Almost all visitors to China’s top-10 tourist hotspots during the holiday were locals, Ctrip said, as travelers now prefer weekend getaways of two to three days and travel agents are barred from organizing cross-province trips.
Aviation experts expect domestic travel in most markets to recover before international travel, as is happening in China.
Domestic airline capacity in China fell slightly from last week as airlines try to balance available capacity against demand, data firm OAG said.
“Those green shoots of recovery [are] proving difficult to sustain, it seems,” OAG senior analyst John Grant said in a weekly update.
Tourism revenue plunged about 80 percent during the holiday from a year earlier, with the number of travelers falling more than 60 percent, China Tourism Academy data showed.
Travel within China has also been complicated by movement curbs retained in some regions, such as the capital, Beijing, to guard against a second wave of infections from aboard.
Sherry Shen, a 29-year-old finance worker in Beijing, said that she had considered taking a camping trip with her boyfriend in the mountains of northwestern Qinghai Province after her initial hopes of a surfing vacation in the Philippines were dashed.
“But now, I can’t even get out of Beijing, because once you return, you’re most likely to be quarantined for 14 days,” she said, adding that after such a trip she also ran the risk of being denied entry to restaurants, supermarkets and malls.
“It’s suffocating,” she added.
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