Chinese tourists travel to 1,000 global destinations during National Day vacation

Two Chinese tourists spending National Day holiday in the Jungfrau Region in Switzerland.

A report by Chinese travel services provider Ctrip showed that Chinese tourists have left their footprints on more than 1,000 cities in nearly 100 countries during the 7-day National Day vacation.

The report, issued on Oct. 8, indicated that Thailand ranked the hottest tourist destination for Chinese in this year’s vacation, followed by Japan, Chinese Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Singapore.

According to previous data released by related Thai department, a total of 7.73 million Chinese tourists visited Thailand in the first 8 months of 2018, growing 16.51 percent year on year. They created tourism revenue of 90.1 billion yuan ($13 billion) for the Thai government.

During the 7-day vacation, the number of Chinese tourists flying to the US saw a decline of 42 percent from a year ago, said travel fare aggregator website Skyscanner. By the end of this September, the total number of Chinese tourists visiting the US was down by 5 percent.

The decline was partly due to the ongoing trade war between China and the US, explained Liu Jiaming, a researcher with the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

China’s mobile payment service provider Alipay said that the per capita consumption of Chinese tourists on its platform saw an increase of 30 percent during the holiday.

However, a noticeable shift happened this year that more and more Chinese tourists tended to spend their money on in-depth travel experiences rather than shopping.

A tourist named Ye Qiu who went to France during the vacation said that the in-depth travel experiences, which allowed him to explore the exotic world, were of more significance for him than shopping.

Jiang Yiyi, director of the Institute of International Tourism Development under China Tourism Academy, noted that such shift showcased the upgrading of Chinese tourism.