China's self-driving car tourism market is booming

Tourists camp outdoors at the Lujiaowan hot spring resort. (Photo: Xinhua)

In recent years, self-driving travel has become a new trend in the modern tourism industry. As people's income increases; the road system and services are increasingly improved; more and more families own cars; there are more holidays; people's consumption concepts also change, when they want to drive their own cars to tourist attractions.

Before 2000, self-driving car tourism mainly took place during the day to nearby locations. In 2001, self-driving car tourism groups appeared based on the establishment of groups, clubs... and since then, the number of groups and individuals traveling by self-driving cars has increased rapidly.

Since 2008, self-driving tourism has grown rapidly. For five consecutive years since 2017, the number of self-driving tourists has accounted for more than 60% of China's total domestic tourists. China's self-driving tourism market has entered a boom period.

Especially since 2020, many people have changed their travel methods, they have a need for personal free travel, self-driving car travel, outdoor camping travel by caravans.

According to statistics, self-driving travel has become the main choice for Chinese people when going on picnics. The data from the “2022-2023 Development Report on Self-driving Travel, Caravan Travel, and Camping Travel” shows that the number of people traveling by self-driving cars in 2022 accounts for 74.8% of the total number of domestic tourists.

According to the “Summer 2023 Self-Drive Car Rental Report” released by online travel service provider Ctrip, the number of self-drive car rentals in the summer of 2023 increased by more than 80% compared to the same period in 2022, and increased by 352% compared to the same period in 2019. This is the booming summer of the self-drive car travel market in the past 5 years.

Traveling is to enjoy peaceful time, camping outdoors is the way for people to get closest to nature. Therefore, the model of “self-driving + camping outdoors” is becoming a new way of experiencing.

According to data from the website of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of China, from 2012 to 2022, the growth rate of information searches for the three keywords "camping", "caravans" and "self-driving" increased by 157.8%.

Although self-driving car tourism is in a favorable development stage, it also faces many challenges, such as many tourist areas and check-in points do not have enough parking space, inadequate maintenance, repair and car wash service infrastructure, environmental issues such as poor garbage collection and wastewater treatment, etc.

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