COVID has hurt tourism and related sectors badly and caused job losses, but there's a silver lining to that dark cloud: micro-tourism or micro-vacations.

Across China, this emerging trend has people spending their spare time on short-distance travel. People drive two to three hours to a nearby destination to stay for two to three days, usually on weekends or during short holidays.

This mode fits in well with the COVID situation that does not encourage conventional vacations, which require elaborate planning, much longer travel time, higher expenses and longer time like a week or more. In contrast, a micro-vacation needs little planning and relatively less time, and is also less costly.

In the COVID era, tourists consider factors like health, safety and prevention and control of the pandemic when choosing travel products. Many of them have switched from traveling to other provinces to peripheral tourism.

The travel distance and recreation radius of domestic tourists show a trend of double contraction. The average travel radius of tourists was 141.3 kilometers during the National Day holiday in 2021, about 71.7 km or 33.66% less than that in the same period of 2020. The average recreational radius of destinations was 13.1 km, which was 1.1 km or 7.75% less than the previous year, government data showed.