Spring Festival, also known as Chinese New Year, is the biggest public holiday in China, lasting from the 1st to 15th day of the first lunar month. Whilst traditionally, this holiday is spent at home with closest family, recent years have shown a dramatic shift in the observance of this festival. Of the 300 million Chinese who travelled during the holiday (most migrating from China’s super-sized cities to the suburbs where their relatives live), a record six million travelled overseas, according to the nation’s largest online travel agency, Ctrip.com.
“Outbound tourism surged this Spring Festival and the number of outbound travellers that we handled tripled last year’s total” said Lui Qing, vice-president of Tongcheng Network Technology Co Ltd, China’s third largest online travel agency, based in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province.
Zhang Han, a 31 year old resident of Beijing who went to Thailand with his wife and parents over the holiday argues that outbound travel is the new Spring Festival tradition, claiming that his parents were surprisingly enthusiastic. His 56 year old father said “It’s a win-win plan for us since we can be with family and my son can travel.” This year’s top 10 destinations for Chinese outbound travel during Spring Festival were Thailand, Japan, South Korea, the United States, Indonesia, the Maldives, France, Italy, Vietnam and Singapore, according to China Daily.
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