Customers wait in a line to buy spare ribs with rice cakes in Shanghai's time-honored restaurant, Xiandelai.
The Shanghai tourism big data monitoring system reports that during the New Year holiday, Shanghai received more than 7.18 million visitors with a year-on-year increase of 16.27 percent and its tourism consumption reached 11.81 billion yuan ($1.65 billion), a 24 percent rise compared to the previous year.
A series of Shanghai-themed films and television productions have increased the city's popularity as a tourist destination, attracting numerous visitors to experience the cultural and historical atmosphere of Shanghai. For example,Blossom Shanghai, a TV series centering on the story of a self-made millionaire during Shanghai's economic boom in the 1990s, has brought tourism fever to places like the Bund and People's Square.
According to data from the travel platform Tongcheng Travel, from Dec 27 to Jan 5, the online search for Nanjing Road pedestrian street increased by 73 percent compared to the preceding ten days and the search interest for hotels in its vicinity rose by 19 percent sequentially. Among the major landmarks, the Fairmont Peace Hotel witnessed the most rapid boost in public curiosity with an increase in search popularity of 415 percent while the Shanghai International Hotel and the Shanghai Garden Hotel recorded increases of 61 percent and 55 percent, respectively.
The recent travel surge has been boosted in part by mutual visits between tourists from China's southern and northern regions. Data from the travel platform Ctrip reveals that, up until the week of Jan 5, bookings for private and group tours in Shanghai saw a weekly increase of 75 percent and 30 percent, respectively. Notably, among those traveling to Shanghai in January were many visitors from the northeast, with the number of bookings from tourists in Harbin, Heilongjiang province soaring by 85 percent year-on-year.
