Extra day of Golden Week stimulates tourism

Anchor:

This year's National Day holiday coincides with the traditional Mid-Autumn Festival to make an extra long eight-day vacation. Travel agencies and tourists alike have been working on ideas to make the best of the extra time off.

Liu Min has more.

Reporter:

With one extra day of vacation added to this fall's holiday, many travelers are choosing to travel to scenic destinations by train instead of plane, a more relaxing and economical way to travel.

"I think train travel is more comfortable. You can have a nap any time. Together with my grandson, I think the tour will be quite cozy."

"Usually we choose to take planes for a roundtrip tour because our vacation is very short. This time, we want to try something new, like bringing our kid to enjoy the process."

Some local railroad bureaus have decided to temporarily add more shuttles in order to ease ticket demand. Manager of New World International Tour Company Xu Min says he's received many requests for train tours this year. The lower ticket price is the main attraction.

"A roundtrip tour by air to Lushan Mountain is 1,680 yuan, but the price by train is only 780 yuan. The slow tours make the journey longer, but greatly reduce the costs."

At the same time, tourism companies in Beijing are promoting new tour packages to take advantage of the 60th anniversary. Zhang Wei is a manager at Comfort International Company.

"One of our travel packages' slogans is, 'come to Beijing to celebrate the motherland's 60's anniversary.' During this time, Beijing has opened several new spots, such as the flower exhibition in Shunyi County and the new science museum, which can also attract many tourists with children to visit."

This year's longest-ever holiday is also bringing tourism companies more business focusing on international trip packages. Manager Huang Guoyue from Comfort International Travel Service says the outbound tour packages have sold out already.

"Due to the financial crisis and AH1N1 influenza, people's enthusiasm for travel was depressed, especially in the first half of this year. The eight-day holiday sort of released the passion. Our sales soared very quickly. Our packages to Japan and Korea were all sold out 20 days ago."

International tours are more expensive now than at the same time last year, but domestic packages haven't seen a change. A recent survey conducted by the National Tourism Administration showed that almost 92 percent of respondents wanted to travel during the holiday, compared to only 47 percent who traveled during the May Day holiday.