Hello, welcome to Roundtable, where we serve up piping hot debates on the issues that sizzled in China and beyond.
I'm Yohong Lin. So how was your National Day holiday?
Whether you were out exploring or enjoying a staycation, this week was a busy one across China.
From bustling tourist hot spots to hidden gems, millions enjoy the break to its fullest.
Today, let's check out the major highlights from the tourism scene and get some tips on how to smoothly transition back into work mode.
For this episode, I'm joined by Li Yi and Steve Hatherley.
Now grab your virtual compass and follow us to the heart of the discussion.
As we bid farewell to another memorable National Day holiday, it's time to reflect on the week of travel, culture, and celebration.
Today, we'll look at the tourism trends from record -breaking crowds to peaceful escapes and some cool stories of how people make the most of their time and give you some tips to help shake off that post -holiday blues.
But before jumping into the facts and figures about the National Day holiday, I want to ask you how's your holidays, how's your long, long vacation?
Yeah, really good. I had planned, we had planned, to maybe travel to a spot maybe a little bit far away from Beijing.
We thought about this in the weeks leading up to the holiday and then I came to work and I asked you and I asked my other coworkers, oh, what do you think about this place in China?
Everybody said, no.
Okay, well, how about this famous place in China?
No, don't go there either.
Next famous place, no, don't go there either.
And the advice was don't travel domestically during the massive holiday.
But I didn't take that advice at all because this was my first big holiday in China and I wanted to do something domestic, we wanted to do something domestic, so we made it to the Great Wall.
Ooh, amazing. And being from China, maybe that's not a big deal for you, but I'm from the East Coast of Canada and it's one of the most famous things in the world and to finally see it was a really, really cool experience.
We really enjoyed it.
And also, the irony here is that we always recommend you not to go here, not to go there and when it comes to our own decisions, we always go here and go there and go to a lot of different places and we travel.
So, the mentality is that we know it's going to be crowded.
It was kind of crowded and people were traveling everywhere, but yeah, it's do you find it a really good opportunity.
You just do it anyway.
You just do it anyway.
Yeah, exactly. So, maybe I'll talk about that experience a little bit later on in the show.
How about you, Yi? Well, I just have a very nice stay vacation here in Beijing.
Well, I plan to go to, you know, Dongbei in northeastern part of China, but I didn't really manage to get the railway ticket.
So, that's one tip, you know, plan in advance, plan early.
But anyway, I think I still enjoy my vacation overall because I feel like, you know, to stay at home and also to tour around your neighborhoods and also inside Beijing and to avoid those typical tourist destinations with a lot of people would be a very smart choice because that's a very good period
of time for you to have a good rest and then to have a good start of when the work kicks off.
I think the relaxing kind of, it's almost like, it's almost therapeutic.
You spend a little bit of time with yourself, with your close friends, quite nice.
But I still have to say for a lot of Chinese people, their choice is still to travel around and we have a lot of statistics to prove that.
Well, before we get to that, what did you do with your holidays?
I went home, went to my hometown Shenxi province, which coincidentally is a really newly emerged hotspot around the country.
People go there for a very specific reason that we're going to talk a little bit about later.
Yes, and also as we're talking about this National Day holiday, you know, it has been referred to as the Golden Week here in China because travel tourism has been so popular during the seven day holiday.
And this year, same thing here, very notable travel growth nationwide and also surge in inbound and outbound travel.
The National Day holiday indeed sparked a travel boom.
And when you look at the data from the Ministry of Public Security, border control authorities on the Chinese mainland reviewed that, recorded about over 13 million inbound and outbound trips during the National Day holiday from October 1st to 7th.
And they also recorded over 600 ,000 vehicles crossing the border during the seven days.
And also when you look at data from those travel agencies, for example, C -Trip which is the leading Chinese online travel agency on October 7th, which is the last day of this National Day holiday, the daily bookings for outbound and inbound travel on the platform have reached a record high during the National
Day holiday. Yeah, the last day.
Everybody's moving to get back to where they need to be, right?
Exactly. And also when you look at outbound travel, the proportion of family travel during this year's National Day holiday, especially in the outbound travel market, increased from 34 % to 37%.
And the average spending on parent -child trips was more than twice the overall average.
I guess a lot of families started taking their kids to travel abroad and residents, especially of fourth and fifth tier cities, many smaller cities, have become new growth points for outbound travel, which is a very interesting trend.
And also there are a lot of people traveling to China during this National Day holiday.
Daily inbound trips have also seen a substantial increase of nearly 80%.
Well, that is a substantial...
That's almost double, yeah.
Over 50 % of foreign tourists stayed in China for more than seven days.
And we see a lot of daily bookings from inbound travels from countries such as Italy, Malaysia, Russia, the U .S., and they have increased by more than three times compared to the same period last year.
So very promising golden week in terms of the travel in sector.
Yes. And when it comes to traveling around, definitely people find different ways to travel.
You fly, you go maybe spend some road trip time with your family and another very convenient way would definitely be the railway.
And that's what I did.
I got a ticket from Beijing to Shenxi Province to my hometown.
Can you explain how the railway ticketing system works during the Golden Week?
Because I think this is kind of an interesting point for people who don't live in China, how competitive it is to get these rail tickets.
Exactly. Because the thing about China's railway system is that you can basically rely on the railway system to go anywhere.
It's stable. It's always on time.
It's convenient. We talked a little bit about it in our national day specials, the fact that I can even work on the train, which I enjoy.
The idea is it's quite popular.
And because it's quite popular, you have to really instead of booking a ticket or buying a ticket here in China, we refer to it as grab a ticket or even fight for a ticket, especially during these hot seasons.
So the national day holiday, which is a seven day holiday here in China, is definitely a hot peak season.
And same goes to the spring festival period of time.
And people would like to book a ticket in advance.
Now, with the official platforms, you can actually do that.
Actually, for example, if I want to buy a ticket for today, I can do it 15 days in advance.
And for these hot seasons, you can do it even earlier than that.
OK, but what's the maximum well, how do I phrase this?
What's the earliest time that you can book a ticket for that is interesting for the golden week?
That's it's not months and months in advance.
Right. No, no, no, no, no.
The thing is, you will have you would have to if you're booking a ticket with the actual authority platform of the real platform, you can do it 15 days in advance or in certain occasions, one month in advance, depending on when it's open.
But the thing is, there are also third party platforms.
So if you pay for the ticket and a little bit extra service fee for the third party platforms, they would help you to grab a ticket.
The moment it opens, they do the work for you.
Yes, they do the work for you.
And also, if you don't really manage to get a ticket, when the ticket sells begin, you can also have this, you know, be in this waiting line.
Yes, something, you know, the service rolled out by the official railway authorities here, meaning that if you're in this waiting line and if somebody who has already bought a ticket for this train, they want to refund and then you got a chance to, you know, get this ticket.
Or if the railway authorities, they decide to, you know, roll out more train or more tickets for this like rail or for this line, you can also get a second chance.
Yeah. So that's well, the reason I wanted to know is because I was looking at different locations, maybe just around the Beijing area, I mean, outside of Beijing, but not too far away.
And you look on the app to buy the tickets, sold out, sold out, sold out, sold out, sold out, sold out, sold out.
So that was a good learning experience.
I guess it's kind of like winning the lottery, in a sense, if you are able to book yourself a ticket early.
It's not that bad. And also the logic behind it is that people have different plans for different locations.
They start from point A to point B and there are certain stops on that line, which means that the ticket they have already got is not necessarily the best choice for them.
So when they got another one, the better choice, they would refund the one they have and you would have a chance to have your first choice.
Yes, I think for this, I mean, popularity of railway service here in China, one reason is that, you know, comparing, compared with flying tickets, especially during holidays, railway tickets are more affordable for more people because there are like high speed railways, which are comparatively more
expensive. But in the meantime, there are also like normal, like green, slow train, which are which are generally more affordable to most people here in the country.
And also when you look at a flying, I mean, plane tickets, the price of plane tickets, they're flexible.
They're flexible during the holiday, meaning that you can see like a very substantial rise in terms of plane tickets price, but railway tickets, they're like, I mean, their prices are basically that they're stable, they're stable.
Yes. And also with this kind of transportation system, we see that the traditionally very hot spots tourist destinations are, you know, still very popular because these are, for example, we have different platforms rolling out different lists of the most popular destinations during the national holiday.
You see, for example, Beijing, that's the capital, Shanghai, Nanjing, Sanya, Guangzhou, these cities.
You also see Chongqing, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Suzhou, these cities.
So they are very convenient transportation wise.
And there are also some relatively newly emerged destinations.
I want to mention actually Shanxi Province, which you just mentioned.
And this province, actually a typical of cities here in this province have been so popular during this national holiday because of the gang Black Myth Wukong.
That's the reason. Yes, because this game really features 36 filming locations across China with 27 located in Shanxi, leading to a phenomenal travel boom in the province.
And the data from a leading online platform, Junna, shows that the hotel bookings for the National Holiday in Shanxi doubled year on year.
And, you know, I have a lot of friends who visited Shanxi to different cities like Dathong and to the southern part of Shanxi.
And they some of them just travel by train.
Some of them travel by car.
Did they go there? Did they go there because of the video game?
Exactly. Wow. And they want to have like a revisit to like a real life visit to see those ancient architecture.
Yes, I would say the surface level reason was because of the game.
I love the game. Thank you.
Game Black Myth Wukong.
Did you play it too?
A little bit. Yeah, they started a little bit.
And thank you so much for bringing the attention to my hometown.
But if you really take a look at the resources, actually, according to the third National Cultural Relic Census, Shanxi registered over 53 ,000 immovable cultural lyrics, including around 28 ,000 ancient buildings.
And there are nearly 500 wooden buildings from before the Yuan Dynasty accounting for 85 % of the total in China.
So the resources have always been there.
The attractions, the places you can visit, they have always been there.
They just need a reason for people to discover the places, to fall in love with it again.
Well, that's why the video game was such a great thing for so many different reasons.
Number one, China had never done a game that big before AAA, but maybe a little further down the list, but still important is bringing attention to those locations, because those are spots that people, maybe even people from China might never visit or might never even know about.
So to be able to learn through the game and then go there and visit and then spend their money, help out the local economy, stay in a hotel.
It's all good. Win, win, win, win, win.
Yeah, and the funny thing is local authorities tried also really hard to promote this idea.
I didn't specifically go to the places where the game got their idea to create the scene in the game.
But I still see, following Wukong and Tuishanxi almost everywhere in just the city, the capital, provincial capital, and you see the local tourism campaign include three themed routes and an eight day self drive tour showcasing different ancient buildings.
And you can even download an interactive map to help you enhance the travel experience with different players in different locations, you can actually go to the location and get a little bit of souvenir and check that little box on the interactive game.
Well, it's kind of like a sight off game of the main game.
Got it. So yeah, I mean, I'm actually very happy to see my hometown being one of the newly emerged place.
That's really cool.
Well, like I said, I went to a place that is not a newly emerging spot for people to visit.
I went to the Great Wall and it was such a cool experience.
Now there's different locations around the Beijing area that you can go to.
I decided to go straight into the teeth of the storm, if you will, to the area called Badaling, which is the number one most popular spot for tourists to go probably because of its geographical proximity to Beijing.
From the west side, if you drive when there's no traffic, it will take you about an hour or so to get there.
So it's really, really close, right?
Conveniently, there's also train tickets to get directly to the Badaling location.
But again, sold out, sold out, sold out, sold out, sold out.
So we decided to take a taxi because it was really our only option.
There are bus options as well, but we weren't guaranteed to get a ticket there.
So we thought, let's just take a taxi.
Well, the taxi ride there cost was reasonable, but the time was about in terms of cost about two hours and 20 minutes.
So still not horrible, right?
To get into the Badaling location, the traffic is the problem because of the roads.
They're quite narrow and there's really only a couple of ways to get in there to the Great Wall.
So that took some time.
But I can say this, I was expecting 10 million people at that location.
Not really that bad.
Once you get into the park area.
And by the way, you don't need to buy tickets unless you are actually going to climb up onto the wall itself.
You can be in the park area, no problem.
You don't have to pay for anything.
But being up on the wall, there weren't that many people there actually.
So we were really surprised about that.
And I have to say, what a really cool thing to see.
I thought, OK, it's a wall.
You know, how cool can it be?
No, no, it's really cool.
It's actually really, really cool.
And we actually plan to go back there to go hiking on some weekend where we can take the train and then can go for a long walk up and down the wall.
So if you come to the Beijing area, absolutely do it.
It's a must do activity.
That is a good recommendation.
In the meantime, for those of you who are not that familiar with, well, the habit of Chinese people, we actually like to travel using our national holidays.
Not only the national day holiday, but also, for example, the spring festival, those spring festival holidays would lead to more traveling back to the hometown.
But still, the traffic situation would be a little bit tense comparing to regular days and also for China's workers day holiday around May.
Still, people would like to travel around.
And I know for some other countries, maybe people tend to travel around using their annual leave.
But here on top of that, we also travel on national holidays, which is why I recommend you if you're living outside the country and wanted to, you know, take a tour everywhere, maybe avoid these days during the national holidays.
That was an interesting cultural thing we were discussing before the show, though, and I didn't know that about China, is that for your your work leave, for your work holidays, people tend to use those a couple of days here, a couple of days there to take care of family things or what have you wherever
they live. But it's the national holidays where they do their big travel, their big trip for the year.
One of the reasons is that during these period of time, locations, different tourist destinations would anticipate people more flocks of tourists to come, which is why they would roll out different activities, performances, special campaign on that location so that you can enjoy it to the fullest.
And that is, I think part well, that's that's like a good circle of you go to more people visit these places and the places would at the same time upscale their service, which is one of the trends happening in this year's national day holidays.
Yes, I think before the national holiday, I mean, we talk about the city Tianjin is hosting a lot of concerts across its bridges in the city.
And during this year's national holiday, I also noticed that in Beijing, there are also organizing the series of concerts, different activities in big and small ethnic spots to try to want to, of course, to accommodate visitors who are coming to Beijing during this holiday.
Meantime, they're also trying to sustain and to keep those local Beijing residents during this national holiday.
One example would be in Xi Jinping district, I highly recommend you to go to a place called Jingxi Gu Dao or Moshikao and that is an ancient road where a lot of like the traditional apartments and vendors located there.
And during this year's national holiday, they're organizing free concerts every day.
During the seventh day holiday.
And when I visit that place, I see a lot of like local residents, some are elderly people, some some are family members, bringing their kids, and they're just enjoying this free concerts, which have very relaxing vibe, I would say, when you look at this, when you compare the very busy travel traffic across
the country elsewhere.
Yes. On top of that, we also have integrated place and immersive place.
That you can enjoy in, for example, Hubei province.
And also during this holiday, over 60 million people visited museums and world heritage sites across the country.
And many people even decided to visit different libraries as well as bookstores.
And guess what? These bookstores have wrote out different themed book exhibitions, different speaks that you can actually enjoy the writer of different of the author of different books to give you a little bit talk about the reason behind the creation of the book and everything.
So yeah, it has been a very colorful and a little bit tiring, but worthwhile holiday.
And I thought Beijing would empty out during the holiday.
I thought no. 21 million people.
That's this is from the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism.
21 .6 million people visited Beijing with the population already being about 21 million.
Some of us left. True.
But I was just thinking, oh my goodness.
If nobody left, there'd be 42 million people in this city.
Now, that's obviously not true.
Didn't happen. But still, that was an 18 percent increase from the previous year.
So Beijing, definitely on on the list of people's travel.
Because Beijing does have the most beautiful or one of the most beautiful autumn here in the country.
You can really have it like a city walk alongside those alleys, hutongs in autumn.
And the weather here is so cool.
In the meantime, sunny breeze, everything.
And also during this year's national holiday, you do see people they're chasing after this autumn view and going to like inner Mongolia and also northeastern part of China to look at those beautiful yellow trees and forests.
And that is that is also the reason that Beijing is so popular as well every year.
It's a lovely long holiday and it's over.
So now we're back to work.
Any tips for those who are suffering a little bit post the holiday blue and finding it hard to get back to work mode?
Here we go. I looked it up.
Because he needed for yourself for the show.
Here's what you do when you're going back to work.
Five tips for your return from your trip is the title of the article.
I will write down note.
Number one, ask your manager for an update.
Oh, my gosh, I'm already bored.
It says text your manager the day before you get back to work to make sure you don't miss out on any important updates.
No, thank you. Are you sure a manager want that test?
I'm skipping on to number two.
Number two says plan for a rest day.
When you come back from your vacation, consider taking an extra time.
How your manager that work.
I wonder what is this website?
How credible is this number three is take a break.
I love this website.
Who wrote this? It says allow yourself to take multiple small breaks on your first day back to work.
Taking breaks can help you stay focused and keep energized.
Number four is start early, maybe go to work a little bit early so you don't feel overwhelmed.
And number five, bring a souvenir to your coworkers.
These are not help to show them you were thinking of them on your holiday, which you absolutely are not thinking about them on your holiday.
This is a useless website.
And I don't need this.
These are just the reminders of how people, you know, miserable they can be after a long holiday.
So happy back to work day.
Yes. What about you?
Do you have any useful ones?
I would say a really useful I would be keep your routine.
Yes. And I know a lot of people will just stay up late and also wake up late during the holiday.
But please, it's time to go to bed early and also wake up early.
Yes. Get prepared for the work.
Reset your sleep schedule, prepare a little bit.
Remember the things that you used to do before the holiday.
That would be a good one.
