The 2026 Spring Festival travel season has commenced. It is forecast that during the 40-day period, cross-regional passenger trips across society will reach 9.5 billion, setting a new historical record. In the first week alone (February 2 to 8), passenger volume exceeded 1.4 billion trips. These figures paint a vibrant and confident panorama of a "China on the Move," underpinned by the most visible signs of economic dynamism and vitality. This phenomenon not only reflects the strong support from China's massive market and comprehensive infrastructure network but also signals immense consumption potential, highlighting the economy's endogenous drivers and resilience.
In recent years, the structure of Spring Festival travel has undergone significant changes. With rising household incomes, an increasingly sophisticated transport network, and evolving consumption patterns, travel during this period is accelerating its shift from a primarily one-way movement of migrant workers returning home to a multi-directional interaction involving family visits, tourism, and leisure activities. Notably, the proportion of "reverse migration" has risen significantly, with more elderly parents traveling to reunite with their children in the cities where they work. Family road trips have become more common, and celebrating the New Year while traveling is a growing trend. Some migrant workers are also opting to return home after the holiday peak. These new trends are breaking traditional spatiotemporal constraints of family reunions, gradually fostering diverse ways of celebrating the New Year, and vividly reflecting the people's continuous pursuit of a better life.
The Spring Festival travel rush is not just a large-scale population migration but also a massive consumption event spanning transportation, accommodation, catering, and retail sectors. Nine government departments, including the Ministry of Commerce, have jointly issued the "2026 Happy Spring Festival Shopping" special activity plan, encouraging local governments to increase support for offline physical retail and organizing a series of exhibitions and sales focused on automobiles, home appliances, digital, and smart products to stimulate consumption potential. Consumption data from the first week shows that commercial areas around transport hubs, direct-sale stores for specialty agricultural products, and traditional New Year goods markets became popular destinations. Festive items such as flowers, Spring Festival couplets, and zodiac-themed dolls sold briskly, outlining a vibrant Spring Festival consumption scene.
This year's extended 9-day Spring Festival holiday is expected to significantly expand the consumer market and inject new momentum into economic growth. Online platform order data indicates strong demand for intercity travel, ice-snow tourism, and island getaways, driving multiple indicators for domestic tourist trips and total spending to record highs. The rising consumption wave is not only boosting demand in traditional industries but also promoting dynamic new business forms and scenarios such as launch economy, ice-snow economy, and cruise economy. The holiday period has become a crucial window for the launch and experience of new tech products and limited-edition items from domestic trendy brands, stimulating instant consumption and social buzz. Ice-snow resources in Northeast China and Xinjiang, along with tropical coastal resources in Hainan, are leveraging the holiday passenger flow to develop related equipment and vacation consumption markets.
The scale of 9.5 billion trips is equivalent to every person on the planet moving more than once, with an average of 235 million people traveling across China daily. Ensuring the safe, orderly, and efficient movement of such a massive number of people is an annual test that integrates economic, technological, and humanistic elements, supported by the nation's comprehensive strength and modern governance capabilities. China has built the world's largest high-speed rail network and expressway system, forming the physical backbone for handling this immense flow. This infrastructure has transformed the Spring Festival travel experience from merely "being able to travel" to traveling well, quickly, and comfortably, marking a leap in infrastructure development and continuous improvement in public welfare.
If infrastructure is the physical skeleton, then rapid technological innovation serves as the neural network and intelligent brain of the Spring Festival travel system. Smart scheduling systems based on big data and artificial intelligence can predict passenger flow in real-time and dynamically optimize transport capacity, increasing the overall efficiency of the transport system by over 40% compared to a decade ago. The widespread adoption of e-tickets and the rapid rollout of facial recognition for station entry have reduced processing times to seconds, eliminating the long overnight queues at ticket offices and gates of the past and significantly improving the passenger experience. Meanwhile, intelligent guide robots at many airports and high-speed rail stations skillfully provide directions and answer inquiries, greatly enhancing travel convenience.
Furthermore, to better meet the increasingly diverse and quality-oriented travel demands during the Spring Festival period, various transport departments have collaborated to introduce a series of service upgrades. Railway authorities have piloted pet check-in services on high-speed rail at over 100 stations to accommodate the growing demand for traveling with pets. Airlines have optimized check-in procedures for large winter sports equipment like skis to fully facilitate travelers on ice-snow tours. On the highway network, smart systems guide drivers to service area charging stations, alleviating range anxiety for new energy vehicle owners. These meticulous, intelligent services are collectively building a new, more efficient, convenient, and warmer Spring Festival travel landscape.
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