The price of outbound flight tickets from Beijing saw a 20% increase week-on-week as the first batch of recovered COVID-19 residents began to plan journeys, about two weeks after China optimized its COVID-19 response measures.
Data from Chinese online travel agency Qunar showed that the booking volume for outbound flight tickets from Beijing saw a 38% increase from Monday to Wednesday, compared with last week.
Cities located on the south of the Yangtze River were popular among travelers, including Haikou and Sanya in Hainan Province, Guangzhou and Shenzhen in Guangdong Province, Chengdu in Sichuan Province and Chongqing city and Shanghai because of higher temperature and mostly sunny sky there.
Airfares also saw an obvious increase. Tickets from Beijing to Sanya city were available on December 17 and 18 for about 1,500 yyua. But that increased to 1,900 yuan on Wednesday and only a few seats were left. The average fare for all economy seats on outbound flights from Beijing in the past three days was 698 yuan, up by 20 percent week-on-week, said Qunar on Thursday.
In the lodging sector, hotel bookings for December 24 and 25 saw slight increases, especially in Sanya, Haikou, Xishuangbanna and Dali in Yunnan Province, and Xiamen in Fujian Province. Compared with last week, hotel bookings in Haikou increased by 30%, and the volume in Xiamen was up by 20%.
Room rates were trending higher, too. Qunar's monitoring data showed the average hotel room rate broke 800 yuan each night, with a week-on-week increase of 13.8%. Hotel rooms in Xishuangbanna rose by 50% to reach 420 yuan per night.
