CBN丨2025 Spring Festival travel rush kicks off

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Here’s what you need to know about China in the past 24 hours

As the Spring Festival draws near, Chinese travelers packed into cars, trains and planes on Tuesday, kicking off the landmark chunyun, the world's largest annual human migration.

Chinese authorities expect an unprecedented 9 billion inter-regional trips during this year's chunyun, or Spring Festival travel rush. The 40-day travel period began on Tuesday and will continue through Feb. 22.

Over 510 million passenger trips will be handled by the country's railways during the period, with an average of 12.75 million trips daily, an increase of 5.5 percent compared with the previous year. About 10.3 million train trips are expected to be made on Tuesday.

A total of 75.74 million railway tickets had been sold as of 4pm on Sunday since the start of Spring Festival travel ticket sales on December 31, 2024, media reported.

China State Railway Group plans to operate more than 14,000 passenger trains daily, providing an additional 500,000 seats per day. Ahead of the Spring Festival travel rush, a total of 185 new Fuxing bullet trains had been put into service nationwide, capable of reaching speeds of up to 350 kilometers per hour.

Meanwhile, China's civil aviation sector is set to handle a record of 90 million passenger trips during the holiday travel season. The sector will operate an average of 18,500 flights per day, an 8.4 percent increase from 2024.

This year, road trips are also expected to dominate the annual travel rush, accounting for about 80 percent of all inter-regional journeys. An estimated 7.2 billion road trips are projected, with highways likely to experience record-breaking single-day traffic peaks.

As passengers have been packing their bags to embark on reunion trips filled with joy, observers predict that the upcoming holidays will see a consumption spree, which is set to provide a vivid display of the vitality and dynamism of "an economy on the move."

Bookings for domestic and overseas tours have also doubled year-on-year during the Spring Festival holidays, data from trip.com showed. In particular, bookings for trips to Hong Kong soared 73 percent year-on-year, while those to the UK, Spain, Italy, France and Iceland jumped 56 percent, 74 percent, 50 percent, 49 percent and 108 percent, respectively.

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