Over the just concluded five-day May Day holiday, more than 300 million inter-regional trips were made across China each day. Chinese consumers are on the move, and their wallets are moving with them, but in a new direction: toward experiences that offer deeper emotional satisfaction.

Per capita spending at major restaurant chains fell 12 percent on the first day of the holiday compared with a year earlier, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

Yet, spending on concerts, music festivals and sports events surged. Per capita outlays on experience-based consumption jumped more than 40 percent year-on-year during the holiday, data from online travel platform Tongcheng Travel showed.

The same travelers who pinched pennies on restaurant meals splurged on live entertainment. This is not a contradiction, analysts said, but rather a visible restructuring of China's consumption landscape.

"Consumers are not spending less — they are spending differently," said Jiang Zhao, an associate researcher at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation. "The shift toward immersive experiences reflects a consumer base that values emotional satisfaction more than ever."

Concerts, sports events and cultural festivals have become major drivers of holiday spending, often drawing crowds from hundreds of kilometers away and generating ripple effects across transport, lodging and retail, Jiang added.

The trend is nowhere more visible than in Beijing. During the holiday, the capital staged 332 commercial performances totaling 1,684 shows, generating box office revenue of about 260 million yuan ($36 million), according to online travel platform Ctrip.

A single act — the Taiwan rock band Mayday — played three concerts that attracted more than 150,000 fans. For many of them, a three-hour show became the catalyst for a 72-hour in-depth exploration of Beijing, helping push the city's tourist arrivals and consumption to record highs.

"It depends on whether it's worth it, not whether it's cheap." That mantra drove nearly half of China's Gen Z travelers during the holiday, according to a survey by social media platform Soul.

That quest for value over price also propelled a surge in county-level tourism. Searches and bookings for county-level destinations soared 128 percent year-on-year, far outpacing growth in all provincial capitals, Tongcheng Travel reported. Visitors checked into hotels in more than 2,000 counties nationwide, data from Qunar showed.

A luminous marine phenomenon called "Blue Tears" on the island of Pingtan in Fujian province shot to the top of the county tourism charts.

Rather than building bigger attractions, local authorities took a smarter approach: they introduced scientific forecasting to predict Blue Tears outbreaks, upgraded viewing facilities and designed themed routes. What was once a fleeting, unpredictable natural wonder has been transformed into a reliable, bookable cultural tourism product.

"It is a clear sign that Chinese tourists are increasingly seeking authentic, experience-driven getaways over crowded urban landmarks, and are willing to travel to remote corners of the country to find them," said Fu Yifu, a researcher at Jiangsu Su Merchants Bank.

A new survey captured the same shift in travel behavior: 69 percent of users now decide where to go based on their interests, not on the destination itself, according to a joint report by travel service provider Fliggy and social media platform Xiaohongshu.

Last year, per capita spending on services accounted for 46.1 percent of total household consumption, up 3.5 percentage points from 2020, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed.

wangkeju@chinadaily.com.cn