The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own. Refiles to correct spelling in first paragraph.

By Katrina Hamlin

HONG KONG, Feb 6 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Chinese tourists will deliver mixed blessings in the Year of the Snake. Travel at home and abroad is growing, despite consumers’ reluctance to spend on many other goods and services. But it’s not clear how long the good times will last.

Authorities tallied almost 5 billion trips in the first half of the Lunar New Year festivities, which run from January 14 to February 22 and include an eight-day public holiday. That was about a fifth higher than 2019, per Citi research. The number of trips abroad for the full year could rise by 18% to around 150 million, Bernstein analysts reckon, close to the 155 million clocked in 2019. The same research suggests the average outlay per person will reach roughly 12,000 yuan or $1,650, just off 2019 levels.

China’s online travel agencies are making the most of it. Trip.com's 9961.HK revenue is likely to grow 19% to around 14 billion yuan in the first three months of 2025, compared with a year ago, according to analysts polled by LSEG. The group has overtaken its pre-Covid benchmarks for international tourism: outbound hotel and air reservations reached 120% of pre-pandemic levels in the quarter to the end of September. Smaller rival TongCheng's 0780.HK total sales have also been increasing by double-digit figures.

The question is how long they’ll ride the boom. Itchy feet are not the only variable. Both companies benefitted from consolidation during the pandemic, when smaller, offline rivals lost ground. Trip.com has slashed costs, one reason why its net profit margin roughly doubled to 34% between 2019 and 2024, per Visible Alpha data. It is also finding ways to use artificial intelligence to help hone marketing, as well as cutting coding time as much as 30%, according to CEO Jane Sun. On top of that, the travel agency is winning customers in new markets like Southeast Asia, which currently account for up to 10% of the top line, up from around 5% a year earlier, Morningstar reckons.

There are headwinds too. Revenge spending - splurging savings accumulated during the pandemic - has turbocharged recent growth; that will wear off. A weak economy weighs, as evidenced by a slower recovery in long-haul travel and duty-free spending. Meanwhile, Beijing introduced fresh measures to slow a sliding yuan last month, raising the prospect of fresh capital controls, which could complicate overseas jaunts. Bernstein's modeling suggests the number of outbound trips will increase much more slowly from 2026 onwards.

China’s travel industry offers investors a welcome break, but it could be short-lived.

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Context news

Travellers made an estimated 4.8 billion trips across China between January 14 and February 2, the first half of the festive season around the Lunar New Year, according to the country’s Xinhua news agency. The Lunar New Year public holiday fell between January 28 and February 4.

(Editing by Antony Currie and Ujjaini Dutta)

((For previous columns by the author, Reuters customers can click on HAMLIN/katrina.hamlin@thomsonreuters.com; Reuters Messaging: katrina.hamlin.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net))