Tourism market flourishing for Spring Festival
Shanghai welcomed 1.73 million visitors on Saturday, the first day of the eight-day Spring Festival, an increase of 4.58 percent on the same period last year.
The hottest tourist attractions are Shanghai Disneyland, Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, Yuyuan Garden and Shanghai Wild Animal Park. Long queues are seen in major tourist attractions.
The main sources of out-of-town tourists are Beijing, Suzhou, Chengdu, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
Crowds are seen at the gate of the Shanghai Disneyland on Saturday.
Shanghai residents are also eager to go abroad, as the orders for overseas tourism on Saturday rose by 560 percent over the same period last year, according to Trip.com, a leading online travel service. The top five destinations are Japan, Thailand, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia.
The recent free-visa policy for people from six countries and mutual visa exemption agreements China signed with Singapore and Thailand has boosted inbound and outbound tourism.
Visitors throng the Yuyuan Garden on Saturday.
The National Immigration Administration forecasts that the number of people cleared by the customers in domestic ports will reach 1.8 million each day during the festival, rising by 3.3 times from last year's Spring Festival and similar to the 2019 festival.
Overseas tourists to China mainly come from Japan, South Korea, the US, Malaysia and Australia. People coming from countries benefiting from the new visa policy such as France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Malaysia and Singapore rose sharply, 90 percent on the first day of the festival.
