On the first day after the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday ended, before the luggage was even fully unpacked, the next trip was already being scheduled. Ms. Li from Beijing told reporters that her family had only traveled around Beijing during the Mid-Autumn Festival, and for the National Day holiday she planned to take the whole family to Chifeng in Inner Mongolia to enjoy the autumn scenery. "The children are on holiday too, and the elderly will come along. We want to find a place with beautiful natural scenery and stay for a few more days." She had already finished her local itinerary research and planned to make the holiday a slower one.
Such arrangements are not hard to understand. During the three-day Mid-Autumn holiday, many people reserved their time for family reunions and nearby trips; once the holiday is extended, the travel radius expands accordingly, and mountain and river autumn scenery, cultural performances, sports events, and urban night tours become new reasons for spending. Tourism consumption is undergoing an interesting "relay": the short-haul enthusiasm of Mid-Autumn has not fully faded, and the long-haul demand of National Day has already taken over.
No distant travel during Mid-Autumn, set off again during National Day. During the Mid-Autumn holiday, returning home for reunions remained the top priority for many people. After the reunion, short-distance vacations became a natural extension. The "2026 Mid-Autumn Short Holiday Tourism Review Report" released by TONGCHENGTRAVEL showed that during Mid-Autumn, local and nearby travel bookings accounted for nearly 60%, and cross-provincial travel orders increased by 21% compared with the same period during this year's Dragon Boat Festival. Behind these figures is a more specific holiday rhythm: no rush to travel far, first take in the scenery around you. Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Hangzhou, and other cities remained popular destinations, while natural spots in the suburbs within a three-hour drive were favored. Lakeside camping, light hiking in the mountains, self-driving moon chasing, digging lotus roots and picking water chestnuts... Mid-Autumn tourism increasingly resembles a brief lifestyle switch that "completes the holiday."
Consumption has also changed accordingly. During Mid-Autumn, data from TONGCHENGTRAVEL showed that booking popularity for local scenic spot tickets increased by 17% year on year, booking popularity for one-day and half-day natural outdoor products in the suburbs increased by 32% year on year; booking popularity for rural homestays increased by 26% year on year, with family orders with children accounting for 69%. A family stays one night in a rural homestay with their children, young people visit museums during the day and watch a performance at night, and the destinations of tourism consumption are becoming more diverse. What can be done and what can be left behind in a few hours increasingly affects people's choices.
When the holiday is extended, choices also begin to change. Ctrip data showed that during the Mid-Autumn holiday, short-distance nearby travel accounted for a large proportion, and after entering the National Day Golden Week, the proportion of cross-provincial travel jumped to 82%. Among those who chose to combine Mid-Autumn and National Day holidays, nearly half traveled for more than 8 days. Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and other cities continued to rank among the top destinations, while long-distance cities such as Kunming and Urumqi also entered the top ten. Ms. Li's plan in Beijing is a microcosm of this change. During Mid-Autumn she relaxed around the city, and during National Day she set her destination farther away. "It's rare for the family to have such a long holiday, so we still want to go out and see the autumn," she said. During the Mid-Autumn period, near a residential community in Beijing, residents watched a band performance. Photo by our reporter Shi Jiatong.
A performance and a stretch of autumn scenery are changing "where to go." After the long holiday became longer, consumers did not flock to traditional popular attractions. More and more people began to arrange their itineraries around a patch of autumn color, a performance, or a sports event. This Mid-Autumn and National Day, natural landscapes such as Kanas, Hemu, Huangshan, Zhangjiajie, and Mutianyu Great Wall entered Ctrip's list of popular scenic spots. Autumn destinations in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Yunnan, Guizhou, Gansu, and other places also became important directions for long-haul travel. For tourists, autumn itself is becoming a "limited-time experience" — miss the best viewing period, and you have to wait until next year.
Data from TONGCHENGTRAVEL also confirmed this "autumn-chasing" enthusiasm. During Mid-Autumn, booking popularity for long-haul flights of more than 1,200 kilometers increased by more than 30% compared with the Dragon Boat Festival, with domestic flows concentrated toward autumn-color belts such as Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Gansu. But destinations during the long holiday are no longer just a mountain or a lake. Young people may photograph autumn scenery at a scenic spot in the morning and rush to a performance at night; they may also buy a plane ticket for a sports event and then stay two extra nights and explore a city. Ctrip data showed that visitor numbers for "Only Henan·Dramatic City" increased by 232% year on year, "Only Red Mansions·Dramatic City" increased by 406%, and "Impression Liu Sanjie" increased by 472%; the 2026 Shanghai Rolex Masters and the Hangzhou Open also entered the top 10 of the performance and event list. Events and performances have become the "second ticket" for tourism consumption. What the audience buys is a performance ticket, but what it may actually drive is spending on flights, hotels, dining, and scenic spots. During Mid-Autumn, data from TONGCHENGTRAVEL showed that hotel booking popularity within 5 kilometers of landmark performance venues in first- and second-tier cities increased by 37% year on year.
Financial services extend consumption scenarios, AI assists travel planning. As tourism shifts from "seeing an attraction" to "entering a scenario," consumer finance is also making efforts in tandem. For example, based on Henan's cultural tourism theme of "Walking in Henan, Understanding China," Zhongyuan Consumer Finance, in order to help the local cultural tourism industry recover and heat up, launched a scenic spot ticket lottery benefit activity on its own official Zhongyuan Consumer Finance APP, deeply combining financial services with cultural tourism benefits; Huabei provides music fans rushing to their passions and concerts with a one-stop discount service covering food, drink, accommodation, and transportation for concerts. Users can search for "Huabei Travel" on Alipay and receive the "Travel with Music" gift package, enjoying varying degrees of discounts from booking flights to calling ride-hailing cars, eating at McDonald's, and booking hotels. Peng Bo, assistant general manager of Ant Consumer Finance, said that the essence of the ticket stub economy is to transform one-time performance-viewing traffic into multi-scenario comprehensive consumption. Various places use performances to "bring people in," while Huabei explores music travel benefits to help "keep people there," effectively generating secondary consumption in dining, accommodation, transportation, and other areas, continuously enlarging the consumption base and better integrating financial services into public cultural tourism consumption. From scenic spot tickets to concerts, from a single ticket to a meal and a night's accommodation, financial institutions are looking for more scenarios connected to real consumption to reduce some consumption costs for consumers; on the other end, AI is intervening more and more deeply in tourism consumption links.
Not long ago, TONGCHENGTRAVEL teamed up with Yuanbao to launch an AI travel planning function. After users input travel time, destination, number of people, budget, and travel preferences, it can generate daily itineraries, attraction suggestions, accommodation recommendations, and other content; if the itinerary is unsuitable, users can continue to request modifications, adjust the order of activities, add or remove attractions, and generate a visual itinerary map. The attraction, hotel, and ticket information in the guide comes from the TONGCHENGTRAVEL database. After clicking, users can also enter the TONGCHENGTRAVEL mini program to view room types, inventory, and real-time prices and complete bookings. "The core value of AI travel planning should not stop at outputting text plans, but should solve the real problem of 'what to do after reading the guide,'" said a relevant person in charge of the R&D and Cloud Empowerment Center of TONGCHENGTRAVEL. He said the cooperation with Yuanbao this time is intended to break down the barrier between AI content and transaction services. Now, with the help of guide card jump capabilities, users' ideas, AI planning, and product bookings can be linked, significantly improving the efficiency of travel decisions.
Now, the Mid-Autumn holiday has ended, and the National Day Golden Week is approaching. Changes in the tourism market may be seen from two details: someone starts arranging food, accommodation, and transportation for a city with a performance ticket in hand, and someone inputs a few conditions into AI and lets it arrange several days of itinerary for them. Holidays are still limited, but the consumption scenarios generated around holidays are becoming richer.
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