Wuhan city led the way in terms of outbound travel, recording a nearly 50% increase in outbound travel on May 1, according to data from internet company Baidu Inc.
Leading the travel trend were people from Wuhan, Beijing, Dalian, Tianjin and Jinan, as China eased travel restrictions and relaxed quarantine rules as the Covid-19 outbreak in the country was brought under control.
The Labor Day holiday is one of China's annual peak travel periods. On May 1 alone, these sites welcomed more than 23 million domestic tourists, according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Hundreds of tourist attractions reopened, including the Forbidden City in Beijing. At West Lake in the eastern city of Hangzhou, the most popular tourist destination during the holiday, according to Baidu, 183,700 tourists visited on May 1.
China’s Ministry of Transport forecasts that there will be 23.36 million tourists traveling each day during this holiday, higher than the 19.9 million people who traveled during Qingming Festival a month ago (April 4-6, 2020). Although this number is much lower than the 67.13 million tourists per day in 2019, it is enough to make many experts worried.
This year, many people have also decided to stay close to home, and many have avoided Heilongjiang Province, where there are several small clusters of the virus. Hubei Province, where the virus first emerged in China, is also not popular. The Hubei Provincial Tourism Bureau said that the province's 22 open tourist sites had just 109,664 visitors on May 1, down 87% from last year, and tourism revenue also fell 95% to 6.79 million yuan ($961,729).
Currently, China is still limiting the number of tourists to sites to a maximum of 30% of capacity to ensure compliance with social distancing rules.
