Tourists rack up miles over China's May Day holiday

China’s tourism industry received a boost over the May Day holiday, with a record-breaking 13m train journeys made across the country on the first day of the vacation. According to statistics released by the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA), the Hainan, Zhejiang and Jiangsu were the most popular domestic destinations, while Seoul, Bangkok, and Tokyo proved to be the most popular foreign cities visited by Chinese tourists. Destinations within a five-hour fly zone, including Indonesia and Singapore, also featured prominently, while 56% of non-group visitors chose to spend more than a week abroad, 12 percentage points more than the previous year.

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Chinese shoppers in the Akihabara electronics shopping district in Tokyo. (Source: China Daily)

Asian cities of Seoul, Bangkok and Tokyo were the top three overseas tourist destinations for China's May Day holidaymakers, in part because they can be reached within a 5-hour flight, tourism administrator said Monday.

Other destinations like Singapore and Bali Island of Indonesia were also popular for tourists during the three-day May Day holiday ending Monday, statistics from the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) showed.

For the first time, average duration of stay for overseas holidaymakers at each destination rose above two days, the CNTA quoted data from tourism agencies as saying.

About 56 percent of the non-group tourists chose to stay more than one week abroad, 12 percentage points more than the same period last year. Their reservations ranged from performances, entrance tickets to amusement items such as underwater diving.

China has been the world's largest outbound tourist market since 2012, according to the CNTA. The number of Chinese tourists traveling abroad in 2015 increased by 19.5 percent year on year to 120 million, nearly 13 times the level in 1998.