Passenger trips reached 400 million during the seven-day holiday from Feb 7 to 13, up 6.7 percent from 2015, Ministry of Transport data showed. The holiday-goers travelled by train, road, air and even by car pooling. Chinese ride-hailing apps like Didi offered help in the festival travel rush for the first time. Car pool trips arranged via Didi were equivalent to an extra 1,500 high-speed trains with eight carriages.
The ministry data showed about 80 percent of trips made during the period was for family reunion, 10 percent for tourism, and 17.7 percent on overseas trips.
Overseas travel became more popular, with outbound group travel tourists hitting 8.56 million, up 3 percent from the same period last year, according to statistical data from domestic airlines.
If the estimated average travel related expenditure is 15,000 yuan ($2,302.5) per person, the tourists are expected to spend 128.4 billion yuan in total, according to a report by China Tourism Academy and popular tourism portal Ctrip.com.
Japan, Thailand, China's Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, China's Hong Kong and Philippines are the top 10 outbound tourism destinations, according to the National Tourism Administration. Top 10 tourists are from the following regions: Zhejiang, Shanghai, Beijing, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Guangdong, Shandong, Henan, Shaanxi and Chongqing.
According to a report by travel information website tuniu.com, nearly 60 percent of all tourists stayed at luxury hotels. Sixty-five percent of total visitors on domestic trips and 35 percent of outbound visitors enjoyed luxury hotels.
Sixty-five percent of tourists chose daytime flights instead of red-eye flights, meaning they value comfort more, according to tuniu.com.
Data from Ctrip.com showed that the number of tourists who took luxury cruises for travel tripled from last year. Some Chinese tourists even set their feet on the Antarctica with the highest order costing more than 300,000 yuan, becoming the most expensive tourist who travelled to the farthest.
271 cities suffer from air pollutionAir quality in 271 out of 338 prefecture-level or above cities failed to meet national standards on the Chinese New Year Eve to 6 am the next morning on Feb 8, primarily because of pollution caused by firecrackers. The PM2.5 density in the 338 cities averaged 148 micrograms per cubic meter while the density for PM10 averaged 210 micrograms per cubic meter for these cities. But air condition in Beijing and Shanghai, and some other big metropolis that have partly banned firecrackers improved from last year.
One billion people enjoy Spring Festival GalaMore than a billion people participated in the Spring Festival Gala by watching it on different channels and interacting on social media, according to data released by CCTV.
The Spring Festival Gala was watched on TV domestically by 690 million views while 138 million people watched it online.
Cinema box office hits new recordChina's cinema box office sales hit a new record, by pulling in over 2.9 billion yuan ($441.4 million) in just seven days, from Spring Festival Eve (Feb 7) to Feb 13, according to the film administration.
The sales surpassed last year's 1.82 billion yuan during Spring Festival holidays in just five days.
The ticket sales of The Mermaid movie hit one billion yuan in four days after being released.
409,000 red envelopes being sent or received in a secondAccording to Tencent Holdings Ltd, 420 million people participated in Red Envelope, an interactive game on instant messaging app WeChat where people can gift certain amount of money as best wishes to others.
The number of all the red packets that were given and received reached 8.08 billion, eight times than that in last year which is 1.01 billion.
The peak time was 00:06:09 when 409,000 electronic red envelopes were sent and received.
65.6 percent of Alipay users travel from workplace to homeOn Feb 7, or the New Year eve, 65.6 percent of Alipay users travelled from workplace to home, data from the Ant Financial Services showed.
The top three cities that saw the most people leave for hometown were Shenzhen, Dongguan and Guangzhou, all from South China's Guangdong province, while the top three cities with the most people pouring in are Anqing, East China's Anhui province, Huanggang, Central China's Hubei province, and Meizhou, Guangdong province.
Online shopping increases by 200 percentOnline orders on China's leading shopping platforms Taobao.com and Tmall.com increased 200 percent year on year between the first to the fourth day of the Spring Festival (Feb 8-11), according to data from Alibaba Group.
The top five places that saw the highest volume of transaction were Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Jiangsu, and the top five goods sold were imported food, paper products, drinks and beverage, confectionery and bakery products, and diapers and wet tissue.
Nearly 4 hours a day spent on smartphonesSmart phone users on average spent 3.91 hours a day on New Year's Eve and the first day of the Spring Festival (Feb 7-8), the peak period for New Year greetings, which is one hour more from the same period of last year.
The data is based on the 650 million daily active users on China's leading cell phone smart push service Getui. Grabbing red envelopes and instance messaging were the most common usages.
Data source: Xinhua, National Tourism Administration, Ministry of Transport, tuniu.com, Ctrip.com