China’s May Day holidays open on an upbeat note with flight, hotel bookings hitting record highs over 1st day

The May Day holidays opened on an upbeat note, with flight and hotel bookings hitting record highs on Saturday, as "revenge" travel and consumption is now all the rage over the five-day holiday, the first long break Chinese people could enjoy taking trips this year after the stay-put-advocated Spring Festival.

Bookings for flights taking off Saturday, the first day of the May Day holidays, hit a record high, per data provided by Chinese online travel agency platform Qunar to Global Times on Sunday.

The figure suggests a rise of about 20 percent over the bookings for the first day of May Day holidays in 2019.

Meanwhile, bookings for hotels that were checked into Saturday also hit a fresh high, the Qunar data showed. The fevor continued into Sunday, with Shanghai Disneyland Hotel fully booked for Sunday check-ins. Bookings for hotels surrounding the Badaling Great Wall in Beijing soared 80 percent compared with 2019.

The frenzy is not only confined to travel hotspots. Many hotels in Anshan, Northeast China's Liaoning Province, traditionally not a tourist city, were also booked out on Saturday.

Tickets for the Summer Palace in Beijing until Tuesday had been sold out as of 8am Sunday and the hotspot's Wednesday tickets had been 86 percent booked, Beijing Youth Daily reported Sunday.

The holiday also fired up other sources of consumer spending.

The country's box office totaled 455.47 million yuan ($70.37 million) on Saturday, according to Chinese ticketing platform Maoyan. The May Day holiday box office, including presales, had surpassed 600 million yuan as of Sunday noon.

On top of that, the second May 5 shopping festival kicked off in Shanghai on Saturday, with realtime consumer payout data from China UnionPay, Alipay and Tencent Pay showing that consumers forked out over 2 billion yuan from 8pm to 10pm Saturday. By comparison, it took nearly three hours for the spending data to top 2 billion yuan during last year's Shanghai shopping festival.