Recently, the People's Bank of China, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage jointly issued the “Notice on Further Optimizing Payment Services at Key Cultural Tourism Places to Improve Payment Convenience”. The “Notice” clearly states that three-star and above tourist hotels, national 5A and 4A tourist attractions, national and provincial tourist resorts, and national tourist and leisure districts must achieve full coverage of domestic and foreign bank card acceptance.

Relevant business entities of key cultural tourism venues should maintain manual ticketing windows, support cash payments, and guarantee consumers' payment options.

Actively promote the establishment of foreign currency exchange business outlets in cultural tourism places with a large number of foreign visitors to China, and improve the level of foreign currency exchange services. Continue to improve mobile payment services, optimize business processes, enrich product functions, and facilitate mobile payments in online and offline scenarios in cultural tourism venues.

Ctrip, Qunar.com, and Tongcheng have all published May Day travel outlook reports.

April 16 is also the period when train tickets go on sale the day before the May 1st holiday.

On the Where to Go platform, travelers have already booked tickets in advance. Judging from the reservation situation, it is no less difficult to buy tickets for popular routes such as Beijing-Shanghai, Chengdu-Xi'an, Shanghai-Wuhan, Shenzhen-Changsha, and Beijing-Qingdao.

At the same time, outbound travel has also entered a peak reservation period. In addition to popular destinations such as Singapore, Thailand, Japan, and South Korea, travelers also tend to explore small foreign towns. On where to go platforms, as of April 15, 957 hotels in foreign cities had already been booked by Chinese travelers.

The Zhitong Finance App learned that May 1st Golden Week is approaching. The Hong Kong Tourism Authority predicts that about 680 mainland free travel groups will enter the country this year. It is estimated that there will be 130 tours on the first 3 days, and 120 and 100 on the next 2 days, respectively, up about 50% from 451 last year.

The Hong Kong Tourism Authority will step up inspections at stores and ports mainly visited by mainland tour groups. It is confident that chaos will not occur.

Tourism-related businesses:

OTA platforms: Ctrip Group-S (09961), Tongcheng Travel (00780)

Macau segment: MGM China (02282), Wynn Macau (01128), Sands China (01928), Aobo Holdings (00880), Galaxy Entertainment (00027)

Scenic area category: Fosun Tourism Culture (01992), Hong Kong China Travel Service (00308), etc.

Hotel category: Shangri-La (Asia) (00069), Huazhu Group-S (01179): On February 21, Huazhu Group released data that it received more than 7.35 million visitors during the 2024 Spring Festival holiday, 2.3 times the number of visitors during the Spring Festival holiday last year. The hotel occupancy rate increased by more than 20 percentage points over last year's Spring Festival holiday, and nearly 12 percentage points higher than the 2019 Spring Festival holiday hotel occupancy rate according to a comparable scale.