Australia ranked among the most sought-after destinations for Chinese travellers during the October 1 to 7 national holiday, Trip.com said. An official holiday calendar gave people 13 days off, and travel bookings climbed. The figures trace travel through holiday schedules, border statistics and a bilateral tour program that channels some group trips through approved agencies.
The holiday calendar sets the pace
The three-day Mid-Autumn Festival public holiday coincided with Golden Week, giving people 13 days off. More than 2.2 million inbound and outbound passengers travelled during the festival, according to China's official immigration data. That marked a 16.8 per cent increase on the same holiday last year.
Flight bookings from China to Australia for October 2026 rose 19 per cent compared with October 2025, International Air Transport Association data showed. Trip.com said travellers booked “longer and further trips beyond the region” this year. The figures point to a travel surge, while the official border count records people entering and leaving during the holiday period.
Fei Chang and her husband travelled to Australia during the holiday. In the Whitsundays, they were struck by how many Chinese tourists they encountered. “At some tourist spots, it felt like I could almost speak Mandarin to everyone,” Chang said. The couple also visited beaches in Sydney.
Tour operators and approved channels
Zhang Cheng, a Melbourne travel agent and owner of Great Wall Travel Services, said her agency had received a surge in bookings over the past week. The agency primarily takes bookings from Chinese-speaking tourists, but Zhang said she wasn’t sure how many visitors came from overseas and how many belonged to Australia’s Chinese-speaking community.
“We are fully booked with two-day tours to the Great Ocean Road,” she said. This week, Zhang was taking a group of Chinese-speaking tourists to Canberra for one of the Southern Hemisphere’s biggest horticultural shows.
Chinese guided-tour groups sometimes travel under the Approved Destination Status (ADS) scheme, a bilateral agreement that lets approved agencies arrange group tours from China to Australia. The program paused during COVID and resumed in 2023. More than 300,000 tourists reportedly joined an ADS group tour in the 2019 financial year. In the 2026 financial year, the number of visitors on ADS group trips fell to 70,205.
The market has not returned to its earlier peak
Zhang said travellers had tended to take big group tours before the pandemic, but now preferred “quality trips” in small groups or road trips by themselves. The shift in preferences coincides with the drop in ADS group-tour visitors; those figures cover that channel, not every Chinese-speaking traveller or visitor to Australia.
China was Australia’s second-largest inbound tourist market in 2025, according to Tourism Research Australia. Australia received 1.04 million visitors from China that year, a 17 per cent increase year-on-year. The total remained below the 1.4 million visitors recorded in 2019, before COVID. The holiday rush is real. But arrivals haven’t returned to that earlier level.