Chinese favour trips abroad for New Year
Outbound travel for the holiday break is expected to top a record 6m passengers
Shi Ying won’t be making the traditional pilgrimage back to Shanghai to celebrate the Lunar New Year holiday with her extended family. Instead, they’re all going to Japan for shopping and sightseeing.
That new custom lets her family bypass the mobs, clogged roads and subways, lousy customer services — and boredom — that can mark holidays at home. During the past few celebrations, Shi and her relatives left China for Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the US.
“The last thing my parents want for the Chinese New Year is a cheerless holiday with the three of us staying home in Shanghai,” said Shi, 30, who works for a non-governmental organisation in Beijing. “Going overseas during the Spring Festival costs about the same as going to some domestic tourist spots.”
The essence of China’s sevenday holiday, also called Spring Festival, is morphing as rising incomes and an expanding network of international flights prompt more people to go abroad — the equivalent of Americans choosing Bermuda over the Midwest for Thanksgiving. Outbound travel for the holiday break is expected to top a record 6 million passengers, with airlines hauling near-full loads to Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia.
“Chinese New Year is a major international peak for the Chinese airlines,” said Steve Saxon, a Shanghai-based partner at consultant McKinsey & Co. “For many, this is one of the only two opportunities to take a long holiday during the year.”
‘Swim in money’
The Spring Festival shuts down the world’s second-biggest economy for a week as hundreds of millions of factory and office workers leave their adopted homes in Shenzhen or Beijing to reconnect with their ancestral ones, often on the opposite side of the country. Thousands more expatriates return.
This year’s celebration, from January 27 through February 2, will see the biggest mass migration of people on Earth. More than 414 million Chinese will ride in planes and trains — as if everyone in the European Union was on the move.
About 58.3 million people are expected to fly, representing a 10 per cent increase from last year, according to estimates by the Civil Aviation Administration of China. Chinese airlines generate about 20 per cent of their revenue during this period, Saxon said.
Chinese will travel to 174 destinations outside mainland China for an average of 9.2 days during the holiday period, according to online travel service Ctrip.com International Ltd.
“Any airline should be able to swim in money during a Chinese travelling holiday,” said Will Horton, a Hong Kong-based analyst at CAPA Centre for Aviation.
Economic growth
Fuelling those excursions is an economy growing annually by at least 6.7 per cent since 1990, giving people more money to spend. Disposable income for urban households rose 165 per cent from 2006 to 2015, reaching about 31,195 yuan ($4,551), according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
Instead of going back to her hometown in the northeast China forest, Xi Chunhui is going to Macau, Singapore and Hong Kong for 11 days with a friend.
“The Spring Festival celebration is the same old thing every year at home,” said Xi, 27, an editor for an internet portal in Beijing. “I don’t think me not being there with them will kill the mood.”
Going sightseeing abroad also is a consequence of the government’s generations-long policy restricting most families to one child, said Catherine Lim, a Singapore-based analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. A moreaffluent younger generation now wants to see the world, she said.