With Golden Week now behind us, it’s time to crunch numbers and see what can be learnt. Xinhua reported that the domestic market boomed with 888 million domestic tourist trips during the eight-day holiday. The triple eight does almost looks too auspicious to be true – eight being a lucky number in China – but would the Ministry of Culture and Tourism really do us that dirty?
The numbers jump by an oddly sequential 123 million trips compared with 2024’s figures, and domestic tourism spending reached RMB 809 billion (about US$ 113.8 billion), up RMB 108 billion (about US$ 15 billion) year on year, reports the Ministry.
Shanghai and Chengdu saw notable spikes in popularity among the holiday’s travellers. Shanghai’s tourist figures showed an 18.5% rise year-on-year. Chengdu’s showed an increase of 28.8%. Analysts have pointed out that when all the number crunching is done, overall consumption during the Golden Week period could rise by roughly 10% compared to last year.
Also emerging from the spreadsheets is an interesting spike in inbound foreign tourism. This was picked up on Alipay. The National Day holiday saw a 40% surge in inbound tourist spending on the lifestyle/payment app. When on holiday, these laowai (foreigners) spent widely in retail, boosting Alipay spending in that sector by over 200% compared to the same period last year. Could this be the true end to the post-Covid sluggishness in China’s foreign tourist trade? Perhaps, but there could also be something else at play here: China has done remarkably well as a soft power of late.
There was the TikTok-ban shift to Rednote, where many foreigners were shocked to see images of China’s cities popping with cyberpunk flare. Before that, Black Myth: Wukong turned heads east. In fact, earlier this year the Brand Finance Global Soft Power Index declared China now holds second place in global soft power rankings – second only to the land of blue jeans and Big Macs.
It’s been a good week for China’s tourism industry. Could it be a one-off uptick? Domestic trips over this Spring Festival 2025 showed a 5.9% year-on-year rise. Spending was up 7% year-on-year, too. Wherever the next holiday takes China’s 888 million travellers, one thing’s for sure: it all points to a very promising trend in China’s tourism sector.
