{"id":919251,"date":"2026-10-07T09:46:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T09:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/919251\/"},"modified":"2026-10-07T09:46:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T09:46:11","slug":"australia-among-top-picks-for-chinese-tourists-during-golden-week-holiday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/919251\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia among top picks for Chinese tourists during Golden Week holiday"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Fei\u00a0Chang\u00a0and her husband landed in the Whitsundays for their holiday, they were shocked to find it filled with Chinese tourists.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“At some tourist spots, it felt like I could almost speak Mandarin to everyone,” she said.<\/p>\n

Ms Chang and her husband were among the Chinese tourists who visited Australia over the past week, during China’s week-long national day holiday that ends today.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This year, the timing of the three-day Mid-Autumn Festival public holiday together with Golden Week from October 1 to 7 gave people 13 days off.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"couple<\/p>\n

Fei Chang and her husband enjoyed visiting beaches in Sydney. (Supplied: Fei Chang)<\/p>\n

Australia was one of the most sought-after destinations for Chinese travellers, according to one of China’s popular travel booking platforms Trip.com.<\/p>\n

The company said people were\u00a0also taking “longer and further trips beyond the region” this year.<\/p>\n

International Air Transport Association (IATA)\u00a0data showed that flight bookings from China to Australia for October 2026 were up 19 per cent compared to October 2025.<\/p>\n

There were also more than 2.2 million inbound and outbound passengers during the Mid-Autumn Festival, according to China’s official immigration data, a 16.8 per cent increase compared to the same holiday last year.<\/p>\n

Zhang Cheng, a Melbourne travel agent and owner of Great Wall Travel Services,\u00a0told the ABC that she had received a surge in bookings over the past week.<\/p>\n

Her agency takes bookings primarily from Chinese-speaking tourists.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"circular<\/p>\n

The number of Chinese tourists in Australia is yet to return to pre-COVID highs.\u00a0 (Supplied: Fei Chang)<\/p>\n

However, Ms Zhang was not sure how many of those tourists were from overseas and how many were from the Chinese-speaking community in Australia.<\/p>\n

“We are fully booked with two-day tours to the Great Ocean Road,” she said.<\/p>\n

This week, Ms Zhang\u00a0is taking a group\u00a0of Chinese-speaking tourists to Canberra\u00a0for\u00a0one of the biggest horticultural shows in the Southern Hemisphere.<\/p>\n

Tourists prefer ‘quality trips’\"a<\/p>\n

Ms Chang says she was shocked to see so many Chinese tourists in Australia.\u00a0 (Reuters: David Gray, file)<\/p>\n

China was Australia’s second-largest inbound\u00a0tourist\u00a0market\u00a0in 2025, according to Tourism Research Australia.<\/p>\n

In 2025,\u00a0Australia saw 1.04 million visitors from China, a 17 per cent increase year-on-year.<\/p>\n

However, this was still below the 1.4 million visitors from China\u00a0pre-COVID, in 2019.<\/p>\n

Ms Zhang said before the pandemic, people tended to travel in big groups.<\/p>\n

But they now\u00a0prefer\u00a0“quality trips” in small groups or going on road trip by themselves, she said.<\/p>\n

Chinese guided-tour groups sometimes operate under the Approved Destination Status (ADS) scheme, which is a bilateral agreement\u00a0that facilitates group tours from China to Australia,\u00a0organised by approved agencies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The program\u00a0was paused during COVID and resumed in 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n

More than 300,000 tourists reportedly joined an ADS group tour in 2019 financial year, according to Austrade data.<\/p>\n

In the 2026 financial year, the number of visitors on ADS group trips dropped to 70,205.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Fei\u00a0Chang\u00a0and her husband landed in the Whitsundays for their holiday, they were shocked to find it filled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":919252,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[22520,64,63,99,512,4690,2458,22928,487440,487439,487441,6771,26681,26400],"class_list":["post-919251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-asd","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-china","tag-chinese","tag-data","tag-flight","tag-golden-week","tag-group-tour","tag-national-holiday","tag-tourism","tag-tourist","tag-travel-agency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=919251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/919252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=919251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=919251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=919251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}