Call for paid holidays to be longer
Print Edition
The public and travel industry want longer and guaranteed paid leave to help meet travel demand after the new holiday plan for 2014 fell short of expectations.
Apart from the weeklong Lunar New Year holiday, a traditional occasion for family reunions, there used to be another two long holidays, May Day and National Day.
The May Day holiday was shortened to three days in 2009. This left only one golden travel season, or National Day holiday, which results in traffic jams and crowded tourist sites. This has been a source of complaint for the public.
Many want the May Day holiday to be lengthened back to a week, as well as longer and better guaranteed paid leave to help ease the travel rush.
During the National Day holiday in the first week of October this year, tourist destinations reported 428 million visitors, generating revenue of 223.3 billion yuan (US$36.8 billion), official data showed.
“Excessive crowds during travel rush shows the shortage of long vacations,” said Liu Simin of the tourism researcher center under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
According to statistics from the National Holiday Office, people with 10 years of service in 62 countries and regions it surveyed worldwide are eligible to 19 days paid leave on average. China offers just 10 days.
“It seems like an easy decision to extend the retirement age. Why is it so difficult to have more days off?” was one online comment.
Wang Qiyan, director of the leisure travel research center under Renmin University of China, said millions of migrants and other city workers want to travel back home a couple of times a year.
“One or even two golden weeklong holidays can no longer meet the demand that has been rising with higher family earnings,” Wang said.
Zhang Hui, head of the tourism department of Beijing Jiaotong University, said the number of visits a Chinese person makes a year on average is only a fifth of that in developed countries.
Fewer longer holidays mean fewer longer trips, thus limiting the ability to boost domestic demand and the service sector, Zhang said.
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