Watching air travel as Chinese tourism picks up

Chinese travelers have a significant impact on global tourism. Their post-pandemic travel abroad continues to recover, but somewhat unevenly – depending on the destination.

VariFlight compiles daily data on China's international passenger flights. This provides an early, high-frequency insight into the tourism market well before government statistics departments in popular destinations, such as Japan and Singapore, report monthly figures.

Charting airline travel between China and these destinations reveals that flights to Singapore have roughly recovered to pre-pandemic levels, while flights to Japan are steadily increasing but remain below the 2019 trend.

We've also added Singaporean and Japanese statistics on visitor arrivals from China to our charts. Unsurprisingly, the trends correlate closely, but there is a seasonal effect revealed: in normal years, there are visitor peaks (and, presumably, fewer empty seats on planes) in mid-summer and around the Lunar New Year holiday.

Travel between China and the US, meanwhile, is well below pre-pandemic levels. The number of flights stands at about one-fifth of the 2019 trend.

Our final chart, a heat map, considers flights between China and 27 different countries over the past 12 months. The "warmest" cells for most destinations are in the most recent weeks, showing the broad tourism recovery. (The Southern Hemisphere destinations of Australia and New Zealand, now in mid-winter, are notable exceptions.)

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