CGTN: Booming consumption during Spring Festival off to a roaring start
BEIJING, Feb. 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The Chinese people across the country celebrated the Lantern Festival on Saturday, which is not only a traditional Chinese festival celebrated on the fifteenth day of the first month on the lunar calendar but also marks the end of the annual Spring Festival.
Gorgeous lantern shows, traditional dragon dance and guessing lantern riddles are among the activities that people join to greet the festival. The lantern shows across the country are ready to bring another big volume of tourists as the Spring Festival of the Year of Dragon comes to an end.
The number of searches related to "Lantern Festival" on travel portal LY.com increased by three times, and short-distance cross-city tours are among the mainstream tourism consumption at the festival, according to data from the travel portal.
Specifically speaking, more than 60 percent of the visitors to the Shanghai Yuyuan Garden Lantern Show are estimated to come from other cities, according to LY.com.
Tourism is one of the best performers during the Chinese New Year holidays, which has witnessed multiple records in areas ranging from transportation to online sales and entertainment.
A total of 474 million trips were made across China during the eight-day holiday, up 34.3 percent year on year, data from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism showed.
The data also showed that China's domestic tourism spending hit 632.69 billion yuan ($87.93 billion), up 47.3 percent year on year.
China is estimated to embrace a record high of 9 billion passenger trips during the forty-day Spring Festival travel rush, which began on January 26.
The country had registered over 3.5 billion passenger trips during the first 17 days of this year's Spring Festival travel rush, according to data from transport authorities.
The national box office during the Spring Festival is also a big winner thanks to the Chinese people's growing spending power.
Bolstered by a string of blockbuster films, the country's box office revenue during the festival exceeded 8 billion yuan, marking a new record high, according to data released by the State Film Administration.
What cannot be ignored is another fact: the proportion of box office in third- and fourth-tier cities during the festival has increased to 58.0 percent, marking a five-year high, according to a data report released by Maoyan Research Institute, which tracks box-office trade.
Online consumption showed a strong kickoff with striking results. Data from the Ministry of Commerce indicated that the online retail sales during the Spring Festival shopping season, from January 18 to February 17, reached at least 800 billion yuan, up 8.9 percent from the same period last year.
During the Spring Festival this year, the number of small program orders on Wechat for food and beverage, as well as wine and travel, increased by 36 percent and 19 percent, respectively, compared with last year, according to the data.
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