As the 2025 CNY holiday comes to an end, one of the trends this year was the “New Year by phases” (分段式过年). The term means that people travel back home before travelling somewhere else for a holiday. This is especially prevalent this year because, for the Year of the Snake, the CNY holiday was 8 days instead of the usual 7. However, the catch is there will be a compensatory working day on 8 February.
“Going home before going on holiday”, or “fly home before flying to Japan” are some of the phrases seen this year. On 4 February, Meituan Travel released data showing that during the first 5 days of the CNY holiday, searches of “Spring Festival travel” (春节旅游) went up 168%. Since the Spring Festival was inscribed as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) this year, ICH saw searches go up 212%, “ICH experiences” up 387%, and “ICH craft” grew 790%. 40% of the searches are from the post-00 generation, roughly equivalent to Gen Z.
Ctrip, the Chinese moniker of Trip.com, released its CNY travel report on the same day. This year, cross-border travel grew 30% year-on-year (YoY) overall, with entry (foreign visitors entering China) ticket bookings up 180% and entry hotel bookings increasing 60%. The data from Ctrip also shows that people are taking 2 or more trips during the 8-day holiday with the 3 most popular types of travel being “ice and snow trips” up north, “escaping the cold trips” down south as well as “ICH Spring Festival trips”.
Car hires abroad also became popular this year, up 42% YoY, with popular destinations including Los Angeles, Dubai, San Francisco, Bangkok and Phuket. Minibus hires grew 20% this year, with the top 5 destinations being Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia. Hotels, B&Bs and dining reservations all went up this year across platforms. It would seem that the follow-up to the 2023 “travel boom” is finally upon us.
