Road trips, private tours top picks for holiday travel

China's tourism recovery continues to gather speed, with destinations closer to home, road trips and private customized tours becoming main choices for tourists, according to a Sunday report from Xinhua.

The upcoming eight-day holiday, with Mid-Autumn Festival falling on the same day of National Day on Oct 1, should see short-distance country tours and homestay tours getting popular, the report said. The number of homestay bookings across the country is anticipated to achieve about 80 percent of the same period last year, according to data from homestay platform Tujia.

People are paying more attention to safety and privacy in traveling due to the pandemic, and there has been a significant growth in homestay bookings for single-family country houses suitable for family trips. The market also has seen mainly local customers in the post-pandemic era, and current unit price has increased by about 60 percent compared to last year.

Group tours are happening mainly in smaller sets with a maximum of 20 people, said Feng Ruobin, a general manager assistant at Aoyou, an online booking agency operated by the China Youth Travel Service. Nearly half of tourists chose to travel with relatives or friends in private groups rather than with strangers, the report said. More private and customized tours are being booked this year, with private tours accounting for over 70 percent of overall group tours in the upcoming holiday. At present, the number of people booking private tours for the holiday has surged 122 percent year-on-year, according to data from online travel agency Ctrip.

More than 60 percent of holiday travel is expected to be road trips, according to the country's Ministry of Culture and Tourism, with Northwest China's Qinghai province and Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, Southwest China's Tibet autonomous region and Yunnan province and North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region being popular destinations.

The holiday has also witnessed a surge in car rental bookings. In Ctrip's National Day holiday orders, over 50 percent of users chose the company's car rental service for the first time, said Sun Weili, a senior manager of public affairs from Ctrip.