China Expects 2.13 Billion Holiday Trips as Car Rentals Surge 268%

What changed

China is expecting 2.13 billion cross-regional trips during the extended Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holiday. Railways plan about 13,000 passenger trains a day, while car-rental platform orders have jumped 268% year on year.

The travel pattern is stretching across several modes:

• Shanghai Hongqiao Station has added about 30% more capacity and begun overnight operations.
• Air or high-speed-rail arrivals followed by car rentals are expected to rise by more than 20%.
• The Yangtze River Delta is projected to average 13.94 million vehicle trips a day, up 3.7%.

Why it matters

The striking change is not simply that more people are moving. It is that the journey is being stitched together more tightly.

A family can leave Beijing at night, cross seven provinces on a sleeper train and arrive in Kunming the next morning. A traveler can fly from Guangzhou to Xinjiang, rent a car at the airport and continue toward the Ahe Highway. Rail, aviation, roads and rental platforms are functioning less like separate choices and more like links in one long trip.

That puts pressure on the points where journeys meet. Wuzhuang toll station, at the Anhui-Jiangsu border, handled more than 150,000 vehicles on October 1, over four times its usual traffic. In the Yangtze River Delta, the road network is carrying the heaviest share of the holiday movement, with roads accounting for more than nine-tenths of trips.

There is also a quieter shift in what a stop means. At Meicun service area in Jiangsu, drivers stay an average of 25 minutes. Some buy drinks, some watch performances, and others eat local dishes or take photos. The service area is becoming part of the outing, not merely a place to refuel and leave.

The informed bet is that this holiday will show how much convenience can reshape domestic travel. If the transport links continue to work smoothly, the lasting change may be less about one record-breaking period than about travelers treating overnight trains, airport rentals and roadside stops as normal parts of a single itinerary. The figures are still projections, and they do not yet show whether heavier movement will produce lasting tourism or broader economic growth.