BEIJING, October 8 — China’s week-long National Day holiday generated an estimated 2.14 billion cross-regional passenger trips, the Ministry of Transport said, a marginal 0.7 percent increase over last year that nonetheless kept daily movement above 300 million people as the country returned to work on Thursday.
Railways carried more than 20 million passengers on three consecutive days, including 25.2 million on October 1, the highest single-day figure on record. More than 1.96 billion trips were made by road, nearly 80 percent of them in private cars, while new-energy vehicle traffic rose 35 percent year on year. Civil aviation handled about 2.4 million passengers a day, and the number of highway sections with jams longer than ten kilometres fell 70 percent compared with a year earlier.
The shape of the holiday has changed. Trip.com reported that hotel bookings of seven nights or more rose 123 percent year on year and that the average trip stretched beyond nine days, as workers combined the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day breaks with annual leave into a 13-day window. Multi-destination bookings rose 84 percent, and rail authorities added 910 extra trains for short-haul demand. The fastest-growing domestic flight destinations were Qingdao, Lhasa and Kashgar.
Spending data pointed the same way. The seven-day box office exceeded 1.1 billion yuan, with first-day ticket sales of 180 million yuan feeding a “film-plus” model in which stubs unlock discounts at thousands of attractions, restaurants and shops in Zhejiang and Guangdong. New-home subscriptions across 50 major cities rose more than 15 percent year on year after a package of property measures, including mortgage interest subsidies, took effect before the holiday.
Outbound travel was reshaped as much by diplomacy as by economics. Japan, long a leading destination for Chinese holidaymakers, did not appear in the top ten rankings published by the travel agency Tuniu; Indonesia, Turkey and South Korea led the list instead, while Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Seoul topped city rankings. Qunar reported that bookings for flights longer than 2,000 kilometres rose 48 percent on the first day of the holiday, and those above 8,000 kilometres rose more than 30 percent.
The figures sit against an unusually heavy policy backdrop. Beijing has allocated 250 billion yuan in ultra-long special treasury bonds for consumer trade-in programmes this year, and a one-percentage-point subsidy on personal consumption loans has been extended through 2026 and widened to credit card instalments. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s autumn campaign lists more than 20,000 cultural events and over 310 million yuan in vouchers and subsidies through the end of October.
What the holiday measures is mobility, which is not the same as demand. Full-week retail and tourism revenue figures are still being compiled, and economists caution that a single holiday period cannot establish whether household spending is durably recovering or simply front-loading purchases that subsidies had made cheaper.