An aerial drone photo taken on Sept. 6, 2025 shows a view of a park in Xiongjiang Town of Minqing County, southeast China's Fujian Province. In recent years, Xiongjiang Town has been encouraging locals to renovate rural houses and utilize idle spaces to develop an ecological tourism industry by integrating characteristic agriculture, homestays, and rural sightseeing. This initiative has attracted a number of young entrepreneurs to start business. Currently, Xiongjiang Town receives an average of more than 1,700 trips daily, with the peak of over 18,700 trips in a single day during weekend and holiday period. (Photo: Xinhua)

With the eight-day combined National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival holidays approaching, multiple Chinese localities including Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan Province, Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong Province, and Shenyang, Northeast China's Liaoning Province have launched promotion activities to boost travel and consumption during the Golden Week.

Starting from 8 pm on Sunday, Chengdu began to issue consumption coupons worth 5 million yuan ($702,685) for travel and accommodation in the city, according to the official WeChat account of the Chengdu Municipal Bureau of Culture, Broadcast-TV and Tourism on the same day.

The Guangzhou International Shopping Season is scheduled to kick off on September 29, with more than 3,000 promotion activities to be carried out across the city, During the National Day holidays, the city will issue catering consumption vouchers, according to the local government's website.

Seizing the consumption peak season during the so-called Golden September and Silver October, Shenyang is set to launch promotion activities in six areas including vehicle consumption, expos, and the debut economy to effectively promote the expansion and upgrading of consumption and meet the diverse, high-quality, and personalized demands of consumers and international tourists, according to the local government's website.

The eight-day holidays, which run from October 1 to 8, will drive the consumer market into a peak season. The coordinated policy efforts will enrich holiday offerings and foster a more appealing atmosphere for consumers, which will generate positive impacts on related industries such as tourism, catering, and retail, Zhang Yi, CEO of iiMedia Research Institute, told the Global Times on Sunday.

Interprovincial travel bookings for the Golden Week holiday are up 45 percent year-on-year, according to data that major online travel agency Trip.com sent to the Global Times on Sunday. On the platform, searches for hotels in remote areas such as Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region and North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region have surged by 60 percent year-on-year, with unique natural scenery attracting travelers, it noted.

The China State Railway Group Co projected that 219 million passenger trips are expected during the 12-day travel season running from September 29 to October 10, with October 1 set to be the peak day.

Both outbound and inbound tourism are heating up for the upcoming holidays. According to data sent to the Global Times by Qunar, another travel services platform, Chinese travelers have generated the highest number of hotel bookings in countries including Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Australia.

Fueled by the China travel trend, many foreign visitors are coming to China to experience the holiday atmosphere, with the top 10 destinations including Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Chengdu, according to Qunar.
"Amid the approach of the eight-day holidays, tourism and consumption are expected to continue to surge, which will further unleash domestic demand and inject fresh momentum into the country's economic growth," Zhang said.

Thanks to a series of targeted policies to expand domestic demand and improve people's livelihoods this year, China's consumer spending in the first eight months of 2025 expanded at a solid pace, with retail sales up 4.6 percent year-on-year to 32.39 trillion yuan, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on September 15.