Beyond the tourist trail: China's holiday travel takes new turns

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Four days into China's seven-day National Day holiday, the country is still on the move, with travelers doing far more than simply ticking off landmarks.

China's railways carried 19.27 million passenger trips on Saturday alone, up 6.1% year on year, with cross-regional trips exceeding 300 million on October 3. Rail operators added overnight high-speed trains on the busiest routes, and at many stations "tourist service centers" help visitors buy attraction tickets and catch shuttle buses the moment they step off the train.

But the numbers tell only half the story. Booking data from major online travel platforms suggests a quiet shift in how Chinese people travel: longer stays, wider itineraries and experiences that go deeper than a photo stop. Multi-destination trips are on the rise – users booking flights to two or more cities grew 70%, and many now treat once-overlooked transit hubs as destinations in their own right.

Vehicles travel along the Lüyashan Scenic Highway amid vibrant autumn foliage in Ningwu County, Xinzhou City, north China's Shanxi Province, October 3, 2026. /VCG

Searches related to "autumn viewing" jumped 80% this season, and poetry-inspired leaf-peeping has put cities like Xi'an, Nanjing and Luoyang on more itineraries. One social media platform reported searches for the Greater Hinggan Mountains in China's far northeast up 490%, as travelers swap tips on where the golden birch forests and wetlands are at their peak – some posting daily "progress bars" of the changing colors, others sharing self-drive routes with mapped-out stops.

In Shilin Village, in Yuyao, east China's Zhejiang Province, autumn is something you can taste. The village grows over 18 hectares of persimmon trees yielding more than 150 tonnes of fruit a year. As the harvest ripens, residents peel persimmons for drying and hang corn, chilies and red beans from doorways and rooftops, a tradition known as "shaiqiu," or sunning the autumn harvest. Visitors can sip persimmon coffee, sample persimmon pastries and make persimmon-scented sachets. The village expects over 30,000 visitors during the holiday.

Classics are also drawing crowds. At Huaguo Mountain in Lianyungang, Jiangsu Province, legendary home of the Monkey King, performances bring "Journey to the West" to life, with young visitors making up nearly 40% of ticket sales.

Moviegoers enter a cinema to watch a film in Shenyang, northeast China's Liaoning Province, October 4, 2026. /VCG

The holiday box office crossed 600 million yuan (about $89 million) by mid-holiday, led by domestic titles spanning comedy, mystery, romance and animation. But cinemas have become gateways to something bigger: in Shenzhen, a movie ticket stub doubles as a raffle entry for food festival perks and dining vouchers, while the Luohu MixC shopping district launched a "film + food" pilot with a fine-dining market, letting cinemas and restaurants feed customers to each other.

In Liuzhou, Guangxi, a single ticket stub unlocks discounts at more than 80 businesses – bookstores, hotels, scenic spots and the city's famed river-snail rice noodle shops.

Perhaps the most striking example is Shitanjing, a former coal mining town in Ningxia's Shizuishan. After the hit film Once Upon a Time in the Middle East was shot there, crews left most of the sets standing. Now the town moonlights as a tourist attraction between productions, with food markets and interactive performances built around the film. Nearly 60 productions have been shot in the area in recent years, spawning three film service companies and a local actors' guild, and professional studios are planned to turn its weathered industrial landscape into a lasting draw.

Customers try out Huawei Mate 90 series smartphones at a Huawei store in Shanghai, east China, as shopping malls see strong consumer activity during the National Day holiday, October 2, 2026. /VCG

Consumption is getting a policy tailwind. In the first three days of the holiday, duty-free shopping on the island of Hainan reached 358 million yuan, up 8.85% year on year, with 55,100 shoppers.

Nationally, 62.5 billion yuan in new funding for consumer goods trade-ins landed just before the holiday. In Tianjin, subsidies reached up to 1,500 yuan for home appliances, alongside 80 million yuan in government vouchers. In Sichuan, a personal consumer loan interest subsidy – a one-percentage-point annual discount applied automatically at repayment, with no fees – has backed over 399 billion yuan in loans benefiting 3.41 million consumers. Nationwide, more than 20,000 cultural and tourism events and 310 million yuan in vouchers are on offer this month.

The message from this Golden Week is clear: China's holidaymakers are staying longer, venturing further, and the economy is finding new ways to meet them there.