Tourists enjoy spring in the fields during a rape flower festival in a village in Taizhou, East China's Zhejiang Province, on March 19, 2023. With the development of local tourism resources, more rural areas are holding festivals to attract tourists and help the villagers make money. Photo: VCG

Train tickets for the first day of the May Day holidays - from April 29 to May 3 - go on sale on Saturday, with many popular routes selling out within minutes. A booming tourism season is expected, according to domestic travel platforms.

"It sold out really fast, and luckily I booked the tickets for my family," a Beijing resident surnamed Huang told the Global Times on Saturday. She is planning a visit to her parents' in Zaozhuang, East China's Shandong Province, with her husband and her two-year-old daughter. 

It will be the first time for her daughter to take the high-speed train. "We may make short-distance trips around Zaozhuang during the holidays," she said.

There are also many people chose to set off one or two days earlier so as to avoid the travel peak on the first day of the holidays. "I booked a train ticket on the night of April 28 to go to Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang Province for a trip with my friends," Mabel Fu, a Beijing resident, told the Global Times on Saturday.

The order number of domestic trips during the May Day holidays has increased by about 200 percent compared with the same period in 2019, hitting a five-year high, media reports said on Saturday, citing data from travel platforms.

The recovery of the tourism market ahead of the upcoming May Day holidays is pretty evident, Peng Han, a director of the strategic research center from travel platform Trip.com's research institute, said in a statement sent to the Global Times.

The order number of domestic trips had reached the level in 2019 as of April 6, which also grew seven times from the number recorded at the same period in 2022, Peng said, citing data from the platform.

The order number of overseas trips surged 18 times year-on-year, and the number of long-distance trips soared 811 percent year-on-year, Trip.com revealed.

Hotel bookings for the holiday started much earlier this year than previous years on the travel portal Qunar. Some travelers even booked their hotels two month in advance, according to a statement sent to the Global Times by the company on Thursday.

As of Wednesday, the plane tickets booking has surpassed the level in 2019. Besides the first-tier cities, Chengdu in Southwest China's Sichuan Province, Southwest China's Chongqing, Xi'an in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province and Hangzhou are all popular destinations, Qunar said.

The travel enthusiasm has pushed up the price of air tickets and hotel rooms. As of Wednesday, the average price for air tickets on the holidays was 50 percent higher than the same period in 2019, and the average price for hotels was 30 percent higher, as the Qunar's data showed.

It may be the "hottest" May Day holidays in five years, the platform forecasted.

Editor: Xiao Da