With the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays approaching, long-haul trips from China are booking up fast.
Group tours to Spain, Portugal, the Balkans, Northern Europe, Greece and New Zealand were supposed to stay on sale until the end of August. By mid-August, they were already sold out.
Wang Wei, president of Shanghai Spring International Travel Service, said outbound travel now makes up more than half of the company's holiday bookings. The number of these long-haul products has risen by more than 20 percent from a year earlier.
Tours that had been set to close by mid-September are also nearly gone, including Central Asia routes, the "Caucasus Silk Road," and longer trips to Australia.
The Mid-Autumn Festival begins on September 25 and lasts three days, followed at once by the week-long National Day holiday. Travelers who take three extra days of leave can have 13 days off in a row.
Booking platforms show the same rush. On Qunar, hotel reservations now cover more than 3,800 cities worldwide. Hotel bookings in popular countries are up 48 percent year on year, and tickets for long-haul routes of more than 8,000 kilometers are up more than 30 percent.
It is spring in the Southern Hemisphere, and tickets to Cape Town have risen 4.3 times from a year earlier. Tickets to far-off cities such as Sao Paulo, Lisbon and Santiago have doubled, helped by new routes.
A Fliggy report found that nearby favorites within a four-hour flight — South Korea, Thailand and Malaysia — still sell well, as do long-haul breaks in Australia and Italy. Smaller destinations such as Slovenia, Romania and Madagascar have grown especially fast.
As of September 10, more than 2.18 million inbound and outbound flight tickets had been booked for September 25 to October 7, up about 7 percent from a year earlier, according to Umetrip. Nearby Asian cities such as Seoul, Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Hanoi remain among the most popular, alongside London, Moscow and Sydney. Surrounding Asia is still the main draw. Long-haul Europe is catching up.