Group tour bookings rebound for upcoming Dragon Boat Festival

With the easing of COVID-19 restrictions in parts of the country, interprovincial travel is expected to see an uptick during the Dragon Boat Festival holiday. Destinations in western China are topping the popularity rankings, according to industry reports.

A report by online travel agency Ctrip says that the transaction value of interprovincial group tour bookings through the platform for the three-day break, which is to begin on June 3, is expected to exceed that for the three-day Tomb Sweeping Day holiday on April 3-5, reported gmw.cn, the official website of Beijing-based Guangming Daily.

One of the reasons behind the rebound is the resumption of interprovincial tours in regions including Gansu and Shandong provinces, according to gmw.cn.

Four of the five most popular Dragon Boat Festival destinations for interprovincial group tours, as rated by Ctrip on May 20, were located in western China. They were the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, Sichuan province, Yunnan province and the Tibet autonomous region.

The camping craze that took the country by storm in spring is set to continue. Figures from online travel platform Qunar showed that bookings for camping trips climbed by more than 40 percent year-on-year, ctnews.com.cn, a website run by Beijing-based China Tourism News, reported on Thursday.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions on long-haul travel, people have come up with various ways to have fun locally, such as camping inside their residential community, inside a recreational vehicle or simply in the living room.

By transaction value of hotel bookings for the holiday made on Ctrip, Sanya in Hainan province and Hangzhou and Huzhou in Zhejiang province are emerging as the top three, gmw.cn reported on Monday. Shanghai fell out of the top five for the first time due to a COVID-19 outbreak.

The room rates of numerous luxury hotels during the Dragon Boat Festival holiday have fallen more than 50 percent over a year earlier, according to data from Qunar, as cited by Guangzhou-based 21st Century Business Herald on Monday.

The prices of Andes Resort International in the northern city of Tianjin, for example, plunged more than 70 percent year-on-year.

Bookings for domestic air tickets for the holiday via Qunar grew by nearly 30 percent month-on-month, Securities Daily reported on Monday.

"Since the Labor Day holiday, the passenger air transport market has gradually picked up," Lan Xiang, head of the Qunar Big Data Research Institute, told the Beijing-based newspaper.

"The number of daily passenger departures went up by 30 percent compared with that before the Labor Day holiday. Civil aviation could expect to see a turning point around the Dragon Boat Festival holiday," Lan said.