Qingdao Airport in Shandong province prepares for traffic peak in Spring Festival. (Photo provided to China Daily)
China's domestic tourism market also witnessed a boom during 2017. Over 5 billion trips were made across China last year, an increase of 11.08 percent over the previous year, according to Li Jinzao, head of the China National Tourism Administration.
This means that every Chinese person made 3.7 trips on average last year.
Total tourism income reached 4.57 trillion yuan ($715.3 billion) last year, a 69-percent jump compared with 2012, according to Li.
The number of domestic trips is expected to hit 5.5 billion this year, generating 5.05 trillion yuan in tourism income.
The rapid development of China's high-speed rail network helped contribute to the prosperity of the domestic tourism market, delivering more than 7 billion passengers last year, as opposed to 5 billion in 2016.
Many travelers in eastern China opted to use the rail network to reach destinations in the central and western parts of the country, thanks to new rail lines opening in 2017.
The Baoji-Lanzhou high-speed railway opened in July and cut travel times by 7 hours to roughly 10 hours from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong province's Guangzhou to northwestern Gansu province's capital Lanzhou.
Bookings to Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia Hui and Xinjiang Uygur autonomous regions each more than doubled during the following National Day holiday, major online travel agency Tuniu reports.
The Wuhan-Jiujiang high-speed rail line that opened in September now connects central Hubei's provincial capital Wuhan to Jiujiang in East China's Jiangxi province in less than two hours.
In addition, the Chongqing-Lanzhou and Xi'an-Chengdu high-speed rail connections have all helped to make travel easier across the country.
The China National Tourism Administration is currently looking to set up a national tourism industry fund to cope with the surging demand for domestic travel. The fund of between 30-50 billion yuan would encourage more businesses to engage in tourism development.
Last year, a total of 1.5 trillion yuan was poured into China's domestic tourism sector. With better infrastructure and a wealth of interesting projects in the pipeline, it looks likely that increasing numbers of Chinese people will be tempted to hit the road.
