SHANGHAI – China's inbound and outbound trips surged during the eight-day Golden Week holiday in 2023, official data showed on Saturday, beating pre-pandemic levels but lower than an earlier government estimate.

The longer-than-normal break due to the Mid-Autumn Festival coinciding with the National Day holiday ended on Friday.

The average number of inbound and outbound passenger trips a day during the period reached 1.477 million, said the National Immigration Administration.

That represents an 85.1 per cent increase from the same period in 2019, and nearly quadruple the 2022 average, the administration said.

It had earlier said it expected an average of 1.58 million daily inbound and outbound passenger trips during the holiday.

The rebound in international travel by Chinese tourists will be a boon to many tourism-dependent businesses around the world.

Before Covid-19, mainland Chinese tourists spent more than any other country's tourists when abroad, clocking up a combined US$255 billion (S$347 billion) in 2019, with group tours estimated to account for roughly 60 per cent of that.

Booking platforms and agencies say Chinese tourists looking to go abroad favour cheaper Asian destinations, with Thailand by far the preferred choice after it introduced a visa waiver programme.

Spending on domestic trips during the holiday also beat the pre-pandemic level, with an average outlay of 911.6 yuan (S$172) per trip, according to Reuters calculations based on government data published on Friday.

This compared with 830.8 yuan per trip in 2019 when the holiday was seven days long, and 680.6 yuan in 2022.

Travellers made 826 million trips within mainland China, up 71.3 per cent from a year ago and 4.1 per cent higher than in 2019, according to data released by the official Xinhua news agency. REUTERS