With the news that Airbnb is to expand its European headquarters in Dublin, the Friday Panel on today’s Right Hook will be taking a look at their favourite holidays. From weekends in caravans to villas in far-flung places, tune in live today at 6.20pm: http://www.newstalk.com/player/
While we might think of summertime as the period of the year when our minds turn to holidays and relaxation, the biggest annual migration of human kind has just taken place – Chinese New Year.
In the days leading up to the event, which took place on Thursday, February 19th, almost 700m people crammed onto trains, buses, planes and boats to head home for the holidays. The mass migration, the largest annual movement of human kind, is now tracked and mapped by smartphones.
For the past few years, China’s web giant Baidu has been tracing the travel patterns of millions of smartphone users, as big industrial cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen become empty ghost towns, as migrants make the journey home.
They have a well-worn saying in Mandarin: 有钱没钱回家过年, which translates best into English as “Rich or poor, go home for the new year.”
For Chinese migrants, the weeklong festival surrounding Chinese New Year is often the single opportunity to get home to spend time with the parents and children they left behind in rural villages.
It is not, of course, without its difficulties, and a massive strain is placed squarely on the shoulders of China’s already stretched transport network. China's National Development and Reform Commission estimates that 3.62 billion trips are made in the 40 days around the lunar new year.
As most travellers cannot afford to fly, the railway lines feel the push the most, with temporary trains and ticket stations rolled out to deal with the uptake. And there’s almost always a news story about adult nappy sales soaring right before the big commute begins.
[Baidu]
