Within 15 minutes of the announcement, searches for international flight tickets increased sevenfold, data from Chinese online travel giant Qunar showed, with popular destinations including Thailand, Japan and South Korea.
The sudden uptick illustrated the pent-up demand for international travel among Chinese citizens after Beijing announced on Monday it will cease requiring inbound travellers to quarantine and will remove restrictions on international flights beginning Jan 8.
Travellers entering China from abroad will no longer need to apply for a health code from China’s embassies overseas, but they will still need to have a negative nucleic acid test result within 48 hours before departure, the National Health Commission said Monday. Travellers will no longer need to get a PCR test once they arrive.
Over on Trip.com, searches for popular overseas destinations were up tenfold within the first half-hour when compared against the same time last year, while searches for outbound air tickets and overseas hotels hit a three-year peak, data from the platform showed.
On Alibaba Group Holding’s travel service platform Fliggy, international flight searches increased more than eightfold and inbound flight searches reached a three-year peak, a source at the company told media outlet Guancha.
The restrictions on international flights under the “five one” policy will also be removed. The policy, which came into effect in March 2020, allowed Chinese mainland carriers to operate just one route per country, flying once a week, and foreign airlines to operate just one flight a week to China.
The adjustments to the Covid policy will help promote the orderly resumption of international flights, and the number of inbound and outbound passengers will rebound in the short term, said Lan Xiang, head of Qunar’s data research.
The overall price of international tickets will fall with the gradual normalisation of supply and demand for inbound and outbound air travel, said Lan, adding that international flights will still be more costly than they were in the pre-pandemic period and need time to return to normal.
Lan expects inbound and outbound travel to peak in the summer of 2023.
The easing of the harsh restrictions will be a boon for airlines, with international flights around just 200 per day as of Dec 14, 8% of the level before the pandemic, according to a report from Guosen Securities.