Within the two months since China launched a visa-free coverage for South Korea, the hashtag “journey to China after work on Friday” has gained traction on platforms like Korea’s Naver and China’s RedNote, with over half 1,000,000 posts from Korean vacationers that includes their weekend itineraries, blogs, pictures and journey suggestions.
The concept is that Korean vacationers can clock out of labor, hop on a flight, and arrive in locations in japanese China like Shanghai, Qingdao or Dalian — all inside two hours.
Fashionable actions embody visiting Shanghai’s Bund, Wukang Highway, and the previous web site of the Provisional Authorities of the Republic of Korea.
In accordance with a report this week from Journey.com Group, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, the U.S., Australia and the UK are the main supply markets for journey to China. Collectively, the nations have pushed a 200% year-on-year improve in bookings for the Chinese language mainland.
South Korea noticed a 157% improve in arrivals to China over 2024, with inbound vacationer bookings up by 145%. This progress continues into the upcoming Lunar New Yr vacation season, with journey reservations from South Korea surging by 452%.
Journey.com continues to see progress of greater than 100% in searches for Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Beijing.
Lesser-travelled cities like Harbin, Chengdu, Xiamen, Zhuhai, Chongqing, and Hangzhou are additionally seeing extra curiosity.
Placing the Development in Context
The pattern comes in opposition to the backdrop of a broader revival in China’s inbound tourism: There have been a complete of 610 million inbound and outbound journeys in 2024, a 44% improve, in keeping with the Nationwide Immigration Administration. Vacationers from overseas nations made up roughly 65 million of those journeys, up 82.9%.
The numbers had been lifted by the enlargement of visa-free entry insurance policies.
In November 2024, China carried out a visa-free coverage for unusual passport holders from South Korea and eight European nations for stays of as much as 15 days for tourism, enterprise and visiting kinfolk functions.
Later that month, China added 9 nations to its unilateral visa-free entry checklist, growing the whole of eligible nations to 38. Vacationers from these nations can keep in China visa-free for 15 to 30 days.
By the third quarter of 2024, flights between China and South Korea had recovered to round 90% of their pre-pandemic ranges.
China launched extra measures to facilitate tourism in December, which included extending the visa-free transit coverage to remain for as much as 10 days. In accordance with NIA knowledge launched final week, greater than 20.11 million visa-free journeys had been made by overseas residents final 12 months — over twice the determine from 2023.
