Tourism recovery marred by ‘special forces travel’

SHANGHAI: When graduate student Cai Zhishan decided to spend her Labour Day holidays in northern China, she wished she had enough money to hire a car for the more than 4,000km round trip – the equivalent of driving from New York to Los Angeles.

Instead, she chose “travelling like special forces”, a new trend in China that has emerged as a symptom of the underlying weakness in household consumption, and which is casting a shadow over a post-pandemic recovery in domestic tourism.