BEIJING, March 7 -- Domestic travel in China hit record highs both in 2025 and during the 2026 Spring Festival holiday, Minister of Culture and Tourism Sun Yeli said on Saturday.

During the nine-day Spring Festival holiday from Feb. 15 to 23, the country recorded 596 million domestic trips, with tourism spending surpassing 800 billion yuan (about 115.93 billion U.S. dollars), both setting new records, Sun told a press conference on the sidelines of the annual session of the national legislature.

For the full year of 2025, domestic trips by Chinese residents exceeded 6.5 billion, up more than 16 percent year on year, with tourism expenditure reaching 6.3 trillion yuan, an increase of 9.5 percent -- setting new records in both volume and spending, Sun added.

Sun said the culture and tourism sectors will formulate and implement the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) for cultural and tourism development, which will be aligned with the country's overall development strategies.

This will help better harness the sectors' role in enriching people intellectually and emotionally while empowering economic and social development, said the minister.