China's passenger trips for the Chinese New Year or Spring Festival travel rush, the world's largest annual human migration to take place from January 17 to February 25, are expected to double last year's numbers, Cai Tuanjie, spokesperson of the Ministry of Transport, announced in the preliminary estimations on Friday.

While travel during the holidays is expected to record a big jump, it is still only half of what it was on the same period before the epidemic.

The Spring Festival travel period in 2022 will have last for 40 days, starting from January 17 to February 25, which overlaps with the Beijing Winter Olympic Games to be held between February 4 and 20.

To guarantee a smooth travel during the holidays while ensuring the effective epidemic prevention is in place, the ministry is already on the move ahead of the festivities.

The Spring Festival travel rush saw a total of 1.476 billion passenger trips in 2020, a year-on-year decrease of 50.3%.

Despite the growth for the upcoming holiday travel rush, passenger trips are still only half of what they were in 2019 before the epidemic, and might not fully recover until 2023, Mao Baohua, professor of traffic systems at the Beijing Jiaotong University, told the Global Times on Friday.