According to Shanghai’s tourism data, the city welcomed a total of 7.3976 million visitor arrivals over the three-day Qingming Festival holiday, representing a year-on-year increase of 5.64 percent.
A total of 55 recommended tourist routes and 50 key brand events for the 2026 Shanghai Rural Spring Tour Season were offered to promote distinctive rural tourism attractions in the city’s surrounding regions.
In Shanghai, the number of searches on Dianping for “Chasing Spring Colorwalk” have more than doubled month-on-month; interest in “exhibition tours” is soaring, with searches for “great places to visit exhibitions” tripling, making art galleries and museums popular springtime destinations.
Between 1 and 6 April, the volume of travel-related bookings for trips to Shanghai rose by 18 percent, with Suzhou, Hangzhou and Nanjing ranking as the top three source cities; the Yangtze River Delta urban cluster emerged as a popular choice for holiday travel within the region.
Holiday travel has not only boosted visitor numbers at major tourist attractions but has also fueled growth in spending in major urban commercial areas and shopping destinations.
During this year’s Qingming Festival holiday, commercial districts such as Longhua in Shenzhen, Chimelong in Guangzhou and Wujiaochang in Shanghai ranked among the nation’s top shopping areas in terms of consumer spending; daily traffic on Dianping’s ‘Must-Eat List’ rose by 111 percent compared with the same period last year.
According to data from Meituan, search interest in ‘flower viewing’ has surged eightfold over the past week in Beijing.
When it comes to choosing destinations, travelers now have a wider range of options. In addition to ‘dedicated flower viewing’ tours that focus solely on the activity, they also prefer combining sightseeing, flower viewing with other leisure activities.
