SINGAPORE-Chinese travelers hit the road en masse and thronged tourist spots in their vast country during the annual Labor Day holiday, an encouraging sign that the country's consumer-led economic rebound is powering ahead even as factories start to struggle.
For many Chinese, the excitement of the five-day break around May 1, which commemorates the labor movement in much of the world, was another sign of life returning to normal after the rigors of the pandemic.
"You can tell the old days were back when you had to set the alarm clock to grab train tickets for the Labor Day holiday," said Ye Tianle, a Shanghai resident who skipped town with her cousin for a three-day trip to Fuzhou, a southeastern city known for its warm weather and umami flavors.
For the wider economy, the hefty pickup in travel was a positive sign after the feeble 3% expansion in gross domestic product that China recorded in 2022. The government has set a growth target of around 5% for 2023. Many economists expect the economy to notch an even faster pace.
The travel splurge also underlines how domestic consumers are in the driver's seat of China's economic recovery. Official survey data released Sunday showed Chinese factory activity unexpectedly shrank last month, a victim of faltering global spending as consumers and businesses in the U.S., Europe and Asia confront high and rising interest rates, persistent inflation and pockets of weakness in the financial system.
China's long holiday, known domestically as a Golden Week, "shows that pent-up demand is strong and excess savings accumulated over the past two to three years are helping to sustain consumer spending," said Shuang Ding, chief economist for China and North Asia at Standard Chartered in Hong Kong.
Still, Mr. Ding and other economists caution that the durability of a consumer-led revival in China remains uncertain, reflecting stubbornly high unemployment, especially among young people, and ongoing weakness in the property sector, which is tightly linked to household wealth and consumer confidence.
During the Labor Day holiday period, 274 million domestic tourist trips were made, a 71% increase from the same period a year earlier and 19% higher than the same period in the last prepandemic year of 2019, China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism said Wednesday.
Domestic tourism revenue reached the equivalent of $21.4 billion during the five-day break ended Wednesday, more than double last year's figure and rising 0.7% from the same period in 2019, according to the ministry.
China's state-run railway said it carried a record 15 million passengers a day on average over the holiday, Chinese media reported, while Qunar, an online travel platform, said the number of passengers traveling by airplane also hit a record high. Despite prices being roughly 30% higher than a year earlier, the number of flight bookings to the hottest destinations jumped 50% from prepandemic levels. Hotel reservations in popular cities were almost double their pre-Covid number, Qunar said.
Domestic hot-pot chain Haidilao International Holding said it received nearly 5.3 million customers in its restaurants across China during the first three days of the Labor Day holiday, up 65% from the same period a year earlier. Ant Group's Alipay, a widely used mobile payment platform, said the number of travel-related transactions processed during the same three days was 70% higher than in 2019.
"Every tourist attraction was packed with people. But it's so good to be traveling again without worrying about Covid," said Deng Nannan, who along with her daughter and husband spent a week in Suzhou, Yangzhou and Zhenjiang, cities in eastern China famous for classical gardens and lakes.
The holiday was the first long-distance trip that Ms. Deng's family was able to take together after China abandoned its stringent Covid-19 restrictions late last year. Her family didn't travel at all in 2022, when outbreaks of the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the virus triggered repeated lockdowns of major cities.
Things were so crowded everywhere that Ms. Deng and her family ate at less well-known places and stayed away from scenic spots during peak visiting hours.
"The trip just reminded me how things were during Golden Weeks before the pandemic," said the Beijing resident.
International travel by Chinese tourists during Golden Week was forecast to be more subdued than domestic trips, reflecting issues such as visa and passport backlogs, high prices and airline capacity constraints after three years of flight restrictions.
Ting Lu, chief China economist at Nomura in Hong Kong, told clients in a report Monday that data indicate outbound international flights in April were roughly 35% of their 2019 levels.
Whether international tourism by Chinese travelers picks up is a key question not only for countries in Asia such as Thailand but tourist magnets around the world, including France and the U.S. Chinese tourists spent some $250 billion on travel abroad in 2019, according to figures from the World Tourism Organization, making them easily the biggest-spending group in the world.
Ms. Ye, who visited Fuzhou, said that before the pandemic she usually traveled overseas during Golden Week to avoid the crush at home.
This year, she said, the cost of international flights, hotels and other expenses put her off.
In Fuzhou, city authorities laid on free buses and subway trains to entice more tourists. "The subways were always packed with people," she said.
Write to Jason Douglas at jason.douglas@wsj.com