Each year Chinese can look forward to three one-week periods of holiday called the Golden Weeks. The first falls during the Chinese Lunar New Year; the second starts on May 1; and the third falls on October 1. However the one-week holidays were only started in 1999, and already there is talk of ending the periods. Why? Adult diapers might be the reason.
An article in China Daily talks of the Shame of the Nation where migrant workers unable to make their way through crowded train cars, must make do–literally and figuratively–with adult diapers on these long, arduous journeys home during the holidays.
Would adding a few more train cars or limiting the ticket sales solve the problem? It would make getting to the toilets much easier for the travelers, but it would not solve the main problem: with a wealthier nation, more Chinese will be traveling now and in the future, and the travel infrastructure must compete to keep up.
China expects 2.042 billion people to travel during this year's Spring Festival period. This is a 3.1% increase over the holiday in 2005.
The State Development and Reform Commission says that travel by railway will reach 144 million, while those going via road transportation will be 1.8 billion and the number via aircraft will stand at 15 million.
Of course all these numbers total more than the 1.3 billion people living in China, so I assume these are estimates for single-trip journeys–cut it in half and you have a better look at the number of roundtrip journeys expected in China.
On January 5, the Beijing Railway Station formally initiated its Spring Festival transportation plan, ten days earlier than the other railway stations around the country. The railway station opened a new ticket hall with more than 100 ticket booths to handle the deluge of travelers.
And the railways are not the only growing bottlenecks.
The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) says that it has approved the applications from eight airline companies to add a total of 8400 new flights for the Spring Festival holiday. The flights are added for high-volume travel cities, particularly Shenzhen and Guangzhou. It is estimated that the total flights added for these two cities alone will reach more than 1000.
The eight airlines who have submitted the applications for increasing the flight numbers for the holiday are Air China, China Eastern, China Southern, Hainan Airlines, Xiamen Airlines, Shenzhen Airlines, Shanghai Airlines and Shandong Airlines.
About 200,000 Chinese tourists will visit Hong Kong during the holiday, bringing it more than RMB1 billion in travel revenue. The Hong Kong Entry and Exit Department predicts that the number of tourists coming to Hong Kong this year will break the record of last year. They hope to move each tourist through the customs points within 30 minutes.
In 2004, officials starting discussing the possibility of scrapping the one-week holidays in favor of floating holidays which would be observed at other times of the year. The Golden Weeks are primarily intended to help expand the domestic tourism market and improve the national standard of living, as well as allowing people to make long-distance family visits.
Making changes like this might work for the May 1 and October 1 holidays, but changing Chinese traditions surrounding returning home to be with family during the Spring Festival holiday is difficult to accomplish. Chinese are becoming wealthier and can spend money on travel, so the infrastructure needed to ferry them home en masse each year will become more important.
The immediate hit to the travel industry might be big, too, if the Golden Weeks are eliminated. But perhaps, over time, the economy will reach a happy equilibrium that might bring travel agents, hotels, and airlines more money. It's a crapshoot, though, in which few in the travel industry want to experiment.
By Danny Levinson
Publisher, ChinaHospitalityNews.com
Danny has worked in China for over 8 years and travels frequently, mostly to Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. His views are his own and do not represent those of this publication, its investors, owners, or other staff. To comment on this article please email Danny at [email protected]–though he can't always promise a response, he will read all messages.