China’s Golden Week travel draws crowds as consumers watch their spending

China’s extended autumn holiday brought heavy travel but signs of cautious spending, according to Deutsche Welle’s October 7 report on people returning from trips. The combined 13-day break followed the September 25 Mid-Autumn Festival and the National Day holiday beginning October 1. Interviews and early traffic figures show why the holiday matters as a test of consumer demand, although they do not establish a final nationwide spending result.

The distinction between travel and spending is central to the emerging picture. DW cited state media reporting a record 25.204 million passenger trips on China’s railway network on October 1. That is a single day’s rail figure, rather than a measure of what travelers spent across the holiday. DW also cited Citigroup analysts who found traffic volume in the first four holiday days rose just 0.1% from a year earlier, against 3.5% growth during this year’s Labor Day vacation.

How holiday travelers are making spending choices

One traveler described the trade-offs directly. Ya Xi, who returned to Shanghai from Southeast Asia, told DW she had earned less this year and lowered her holiday budget. She took a cheaper red-eye flight, although the flight still cost 5,000 yuan and was her largest trip expense. Her account illustrates a spending decision by one traveler; it cannot stand in for a nationwide average.

Xi told DW she was willing to spend on food and set a budget of 200 yuan for each meal. The combination of a cheaper flight and a deliberate food budget shows how a traveler can keep taking trips while choosing where to save and where to spend. DW reported that she was among 31.19 million passengers who traveled during the combined holiday period, but its account does not define the transport or geographic scope of that figure.

Guo-Chen Wang, an associate research fellow at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, offered a similar assessment to DW. He said the budget-travel trend among Chinese visitors was continuing: trips were increasing while consumption remained strained, as he had observed in previous years. These are analysts’ interpretations of travel and consumer behavior, rather than a final count of holiday expenditure.

What the pre-holiday bookings showed

The contrast was visible before the holiday. In September, Reuters reported that Chinese travelers were booking longer breaks and trips farther afield, while analysts questioned whether the additional journeys would bring proportionate gains in spending or tourism profits. Reuters calculated from government data that average spending per trip during the 2025 Golden Week was 911.04 yuan, a three-year low. That figure describes last year’s holiday, not the outcome for 2026.

Travel businesses nevertheless reported strong demand for some trips. Reuters said Spring Tour had found that long-haul packages to several destinations were sold out by mid-August; the company said its outbound holiday travel sales were growing faster than a year earlier. Trip.com Group said more than half its outbound flight bookings were for departures before October 1 and that the average booked trip exceeded nine days.

Trip.com also reported that bookings for stays of at least seven nights were up 123% from the 2025 Golden Week, while multi-destination itineraries rose 84%. Those are booking measures from one company, not a count of completed travel or spending across China. They help explain why the extended break looked busy in advance without resolving how much travelers ultimately paid during it.

An August survey by Dragon Trail International offered another sign of interest in overseas travel. Reuters reported that 54% of respondents planned overseas holiday trips, compared with 35% a year earlier. The firm’s director said travelers were more sensitive to costs. Five percent of respondents planned luxury hotels, while 33% planned mid-range hotels. Survey intentions, like bookings, do not confirm completed trips or actual expenditure.

Why the spending total still matters

Authorities had sought to encourage holiday consumption. Reuters reported that China launched a month-long National Day Cultural and Tourism Consumption Month campaign on September 22 and that China Railway planned additional high-speed and overnight services during a 16-day peak transport period. DW reported that the government also offered coupons worth more than 310 million yuan during the holiday. Wang questioned how effective that measure would be.

Before the break, Forthright Securities analyst Liao told Reuters there was no evidence of a structural rise in daily spending, and warned that more travelers would not necessarily mean proportionately higher profits. The new accounts of selective spending are consistent with that concern, but they do not prove a national outcome. Neither Reuters’ pre-holiday report nor DW’s October 7 account supplies a comprehensive final nationwide holiday spending total. For now, the confirmed picture is of substantial travel alongside evidence that at least some consumers were closely managing their budgets.