Train tickets for September 30, the day before the National Day holiday, went on sale on September 16, with popular routes and time slots quickly selling out as some services proved extremely hard to book.

With the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays approaching, short-distance Mid-Autumn trips are overlapping with long-distance National Day travel, pushing booking demand across domestic and cross-border markets steadily higher. Rail, aviation, and hotel reservation data are all climbing, painting a vibrant picture of travel activity stretching across the country. The extended break is delivering a major boost in passenger numbers, while more diverse, niche, and quality-focused consumption patterns are creating an ideal opportunity for the cultural tourism industry to expand, upgrade, and transform.

Changing consumption habits are giving rise to new cultural tourism segments, with niche in-depth experiences and two-way cross-border travel emerging as key growth drivers. Moving away from simple city sightseeing and打卡-style tourism, travelers now prefer more refined and personalized options. County-level autumn scenery tours, distinctive cultural experiences, and outbound trips are all flourishing, reshaping the holiday tourism landscape. Bookings for popular county hotels on Qunar have risen 32 percent year-on-year, while travel to South China has grown 381 percent thanks to film and TV influence and regional appeal, and visits to ethnic minority destinations in Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, and Chongqing have surged 556 percent. Meanwhile, cross-border travel is gaining momentum, with outbound tourism search interest up 260 percent month-on-month during the holidays, and inbound business and leisure travel also recovering, creating fresh growth through two-way flows. Travel is shifting from merely sightseeing to immersive experiences, broadening the meaning and boundaries of cultural tourism.

Policy measures need to align with diverse demands, with precise supply essential to capturing the holiday traffic dividend. The booming tourism market raises the bar for industry services, supporting infrastructure, and product offerings, requiring targeted responses to new consumption trends and improvements in service gaps to turn visitors into repeat customers and momentum into lasting growth. To address overlapping short- and long-distance travel, the surge in county-level tourism, and rising cross-border trips, local authorities and relevant agencies must act with focus and precision. In transport, railways and airlines should expand capacity, optimize ticketing and waiting-list systems, and ease the difficulty of securing tickets during peak periods. The tourism sector should build on local resources, highlighting autumn scenery, folk traditions, and film and TV appeal to create distinct products for in-depth and leisure travel, avoiding homogeneous development. Cross-border efforts should leverage visa facilitation and expanded international routes to lower barriers and smooth two-way travel flows.

Comprehensive coordination across regions is key to building a solid service foundation, with careful governance safeguarding the holiday experience. Sustained cultural tourism growth relies on full support systems and routine oversight, with the busy travel market serving both as proof of economic vitality and a test of public services. Given the pressure of high passenger volumes, multi-department cooperation is needed to upgrade safety oversight, market order, and support services across the board. For the boom in county-level and lesser-known destinations, transport links, accommodation, and emergency facilities should be improved in advance to address capacity shortfalls in smaller cities, while stronger market supervision should crack down on ticket scalping and price gouging to keep the industry orderly. Expanding capacity, improving services, innovating products, and regulating order are all vital to maintaining safety during the holidays and enhancing the overall travel experience.

Traffic numbers reflect the strength of the tourism market, but quality is what sustains the industry. The surge in holiday travel demonstrates the resilience and vitality of China's cultural tourism sector. By capitalizing on the extended break as a consumption opportunity, optimizing supply based on demand, upgrading experiences through fine-tuned services, and supporting growth with sound governance, the potential of cultural tourism spending can be fully unlocked. That would keep the holiday economy thriving and inject lasting momentum into the continued expansion and upgrading of the domestic consumer market.