As the Lunar New Year holiday enters its final days, outbound travel from Hainan has hit a peak that local transport services are struggling to absorb. Airfares on some popular routes have surged to extraordinary levels, while ferry crossings on the Qiongzhou Strait are effectively sold out, leaving many travellers with few options to leave the island.
Checks of airline booking systems on February 18 showed the scale of the squeeze. Southern Airlines listings revealed that economy seats on Haikou–Guangzhou had risen to full‑fare levels around RMB 2,000 for departures on February 20, and by February 22–23 economy inventory was exhausted on several flights, leaving only a handful of full‑fare business seats priced as high as RMB 6,210 (fares exclude taxes and fees). On the longer Haikou–Shanghai sector economy class was already depleted and remaining business‑class fares reached up to RMB 11,560.
Maritime routes have been similarly pressured. Ferry tickets to cross the Qiongzhou Strait — the main overland link between Hainan and Guangdong — were sold out for the coming week on the official WeChat booking service, with no seats available on the Haikou–Zhanjiang/Xuwen sailings. Ferry operators have pointed to a post‑holiday surge in travellers that has overwhelmed usual capacity, a situation they partly attribute to recent changes in Hainan’s border and customs management.
Official figures underscore how intense the movement has been. Hainan’s transport authorities reported roughly 4.86 million passenger trips across the province in the first nine days of the Spring Festival period, up 6.3% year on year. Qiongzhou Strait services carried about 1.01 million passengers and 257,900 vehicles in that span, with new‑energy vehicle crossings up sharply. Border control forecasts expect nearly 79,300 inbound and outbound travellers over the holiday, a daily average of about 8,800 people — an increase of roughly 24% compared with the previous year.
The demand pattern is asymmetric. Booking platforms show inbound international traffic to Hainan — particularly to Sanya and Haikou — has jumped sharply, with some non‑Chinese passport arrivals to Sanya more than tripling and foreign visitor numbers to Haikou doubling. At the same time, seat availability and fares on many flights from the Chinese mainland into Hainan have softened dramatically: some Guangzhou–Haikou fares fell to as low as RMB 320, reflecting a one‑way imbalance as visitors pour in and then struggle to find return connections.
The short‑term picture is clear: Hainan’s tourism rebound — aided by relaxed entry dynamics and its promotion as an international leisure hub — is creating logistical bottlenecks during peak return days. For travellers the immediate consequence is high prices or cancelled plans, while for operators and local authorities it poses a scheduling and capacity challenge that will need quick tactical fixes and longer‑term capacity planning if Hainan is to sustain its role as China’s tropical gateway.