(Yicai Global) Dec. 13 -- The number of domestic passenger flights booked for the upcoming Spring Festival holiday jumped nearly nine times recently, after China eased up on its Covid-19 controls.

Flight bookings for between Jan. 7 and 21, Chinese New Year’s Eve, have soared 8.5 times since Dec. 7 from a week earlier, according to data from online travel agency Qunar.Com. Ticket prices have also risen.

In the past month, China has been relaxing its Covid-19 controls. The country has done away with mass polymerase chain reaction testing, now permits asymptomatic and mild symptomatic cases to quarantine at home, lifted PCR test requirements to enter indoor spaces, and yesterday switched off the national ‘itinerary code’ app that tracked people’s movements in the previous seven days.

As a result, Spring Festival flight bookings will hit a three-year high and recover to nearly 80 percent of the pre-pandemic level, said Guo Lechun, vice president of Qunar Big Data Research Institute.

As flight bookings started being taken before train tickets sales opened for the peak Spring Festival travel period, plane tickets are expected to remain pricey in the next week, Qunar added.

Frequent outbreaks of the coronavirus in many parts of China this year have brought low the nation’s aviation sector. During Shanghai’s lockdown, the number of flights plunged to less than 2,000 in a single day. In the second half of the year, a new Covid wave swept across China, with flights dropping again to fewer than 3,000 a day.

The number of domestic passenger flights soared 67 percent to 35,658 in the week of Dec. 5, according to Flight Master’s data. Yesterday alone, the figure was expected to have doubled to 7,378 from a week earlier.

A boom in civil aviation is coming, according to analysts at Sealand Securities. Airlines will continue to resume passenger flights in China, as travel becomes more normal again, according to Bank of China International.

The city of Chongqing has seen the biggest uptick, as flights skyrocketed more than 600 percent in the past week from the previous one, with Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport recording gains on 11 consecutive days, Flight Master data showed. Northwestern China operated 168 percent more flights in the same period.

The Chengdu-Hangzhou route’s recovery rate reached 132 percent, with the Chengdu-Kunming, Shanghai-Sanya, and other tourist routes also exceeding 2019 levels. Business routes are picking up more slowly, with Beijing-Shanghai and Beijing-Guangshen trips at below 50 percent.

Editors: Shi Yi, Futura Costaglione