The upcoming Duanwu Festival holiday, running from Saturday to Monday, is expected to see 687 million cross-regional passenger trips across China, up 7.7 percent year on year, according to the Ministry of Transport.
The Duanwu Festival, also known as the Dragon Boat Festival, falls on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar. It will be celebrated on Saturday (May 31) this year.
The ministry said that self-driving travelers will represent a large proportion of all travelers during the holiday, with the expressways to serve a daily average of 40.7 million vehicles, 98 percent of which are passenger cars.
The road network will be busier and busier from 16:00 Friday and enter the pre-holiday rush hours from 19:00 to 21:00.
For the railway travel rush from Friday to Tuesday, trains across China are expected to serve 80.5 million passenger trips. The railways will see a peak of 18.3 million passenger trips on Saturday.
As the Duanwu Festival holiday this year overlaps the Children’s Day, it heralds a significant increase of short-distance self-driving tours and family trips. Meanwhile, dragon boat races and other intangible cultural heritage activities will bring an influx of travelers to popular tourist cities and their surrounding areas.
“It is expected that the four major city clusters, namely the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and, the Chengdu-Chongqing region, will become popular with travelers. Cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Chengdu will see vigorous tourism, which will drive the growth of tourist consumption, form a short-term holiday consumption boom and highlight the new vitality of the holiday economy,” said Xin Minglun, deputy director of the Transport Service Department of the Ministry of Transport.
Duanwu Festival holiday expected to see 687 million passenger trips across China
The first direct flight linking Central Asia and Shanghai sent 110 passengers to Shanghai Pudong International Airport on Friday morning.
The Kazakhstan’s Scat Airlines operated the flight on Thursday, taking off from Shymkent, a regional cultural and economic center of the country.
The Shanghai-Shymkent flight will run every Tuesday and Friday from Shanghai Pudong International Airport, and backward from Shymkent on Mondays and Thursdays (local time).
The flight is expected to further enrich Shanghai’s international aviation network amid the city’s efforts to become an international aviation hub, and create a more convenient air channel for the exchanges and collaboration of economy, trade, tourism, and culture between China and Kazakhstan.
“When we visited Chengdu last time, we had to fly to Beijing and then transfer to Chengdu, costing us 10-12 hours. Now visiting China becomes easier as the new flight from Shymkent opened,” said a Kazakh tourist named Ruslan.
“We come to China to Shanghai for traveling. I wanna see new places,” said another Kazakh tourist named Ayalumu.
The Scat Airlines is planning to increase the flight from twice per week to once per day, reaching an expected annual passenger flow of 55,000-60,000.
The new route is a latest development of the aviation network constructed by Shanghai Airport (Group) that connects 291 destinations in 48 countries worldwide. Since last year, the group has been actively restoring and expanding its international aviation network to offer more diversified air traveling options.
First direct flight between Shanghai, Central Asia launched
