China’s Labour Day travel boom bodes well for spending, but box office fizzles

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By Sylvia Ma and Ralph Jennings

Published May 2, 2025

Inbound travel has emerged as a bright spot in China’s Labour Day holiday spending, while domestic tourism is seeing modest growth amid nationwide efforts to boost consumption during a heated trade war with the United States.

However, in contrast with the rosy travel demand, box office sales were looking to fall short of previous years, initial data showed.

On Thursday – the first day of the Labour Day holiday – inbound travel bookings to China jumped 141 per cent, year on year, according to Trip.com, a major online travel platform.

Data from marketing and tech firm China Trading Desk showed that 1.2 million to 1.5 million inbound travellers – excluding visitors from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan – were expected to enter mainland China over the five-day holiday, marking a more than 50 per cent increase from last year.

Subramania Bhatt, the firm’s founder and CEO, attributed the surge to China’s relaxed visa-free entries and tax-refund policies, as well as improved travel services and growing exposure on social media that has sparked new interest in China as a destination.

To attract more inbound tourists, Chinese authorities have rolled out a series of measures – most recently easing tax-refund rules late last month – as part of broader efforts to boost domestic spending amid rising economic pressure from the trade war.

The county’s domestic tourism also saw modest growth on the first day of the holiday. The number of cross-region trips was expected to rise 8 per cent, year on year, to more than 340 million, Xinhua said in a report on Thursday, citing data from the Ministry of Transport.

Meanwhile, domestic ticket bookings for scenic spots were up nearly 20 per cent, according to Trip.com.

Max Modesti, an Italian citizen and co-owner of a restaurant on Shanghai’s Bund, said he saw a “drastic increase” in tourists over the first two days of the five-day holiday, with walk-in customers – especially at lunchtime – up by around 50 per cent.

“The great majority of tourists were from other parts of China, with about 10 to 15 per cent coming instead from outside China,” he said. “Koreans and Japanese make up the bulk of the foreign tourists, with also many visitors from Hong Kong.”

According to the Shanghai Airport Authority, the average daily cross-border passenger traffic at the city’s two airports during the Labour Day holiday was expected to reach 113,000, which would mark a 23.1 per cent increase from a year earlier.

In a bid to boost inbound tourism, China introduced a 10-day visa-free transit policy for citizens of 54 nations – including Australia, Japan, the United States and countries across Europe – in December, allowing them to stay in some parts of mainland China while transiting through one of 60 international ports.

But the box office appeared sluggish on the first day of the holiday. Labour Day films brought in 185 million yuan (US$25.5 million) on Thursday, according to box office tracker platform Lighthouse.

The figure was well below the levels recorded over the same period in the past two years – 356 million yuan in 2023 and 412 million yuan in 2024, the platform said.