Hong Kong residents make 2.2 million outbound trips for Easter break

Hong Kong residents made 1.84 million outbound trips between Thursday and Saturday, the second day of the Easter long weekend, representing a 10 per cent increase from the same period last year.

A catering industry representative forecast a potential 30 per cent decline in business during Easter compared with last year, attributing the fall to the trend of residents heading to mainland China to spend as well as weakened buying power amid market volatility due to the US tariff war.

Last year, residents had made 1.68 million trips by the end of the second day of the Easter break. The latest figures also mark a 20 per cent rise from the 1.4 million trips recorded in 2018, before the 2019 social unrest and the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This year’s appetite for outbound travel continued into Easter Sunday, with 361,000 departures recorded by 9pm. More than 60 per cent of the departures were at land checkpoints bordering Shenzhen.

The figures from Sunday pushed up the tally for outbound Easter trips to about 2.2 million. Hong Kong has a population of about 7.5 million.

Tourists made fewer than 400,000 inbound trips between Thursday and Saturday – an increase from the 340,000 recorded last year but well below the 2018 level of nearly 500,000.

The number of inbound trips by tourists on Sunday stood at 120,000 as of 9pm.