Hong Kong’s inter-departmental festival taskforce confirmed late on 5 January that the city handled roughly 950,000 inbound visitors between 31 December 2025 and 4 January 2026. The figure represents a 40 percent increase on the same holiday period a year ago and is the clearest sign yet that Hong Kong’s tourism and business-travel engine is almost fully re-started.
Mainland Chinese travellers—helped by Beijing’s three-day New-Year public holiday—accounted for more than 740,000 of the arrivals, a 48 percent jump year-on-year. Non-Mainland markets delivered about 210,000 visitors, up 19 percent. To handle the surge, Hong Kong and Shenzhen immigration authorities temporarily extended Lo Wu passenger services to 02:00 on 1 January and kept Shenzhen Bay open overnight, while the Security Bureau activated its Emergency Monitoring and Support Centre.
Operationally, the city coped well. Extra e-Channels and counters kept average clearance times below 20 minutes and transport operators added late-night buses and cross-boundary coaches. Hotel occupancy averaged 90 percent, and crowd-control plans around major attractions such as Disneyland, Ocean Park and the West Kowloon Cultural District were credited with preventing the bottlenecks seen during Golden Week last October.
![Hong Kong Welcomes 950,000 Visitors Over New-Year Weekend, Up 40 Percent Year-on-Year]()
In parallel, securing the correct entry documentation is still crucial. VisaHQ’s Hong Kong portal (https://www.visahq.com/hong-kong/) lets travel coordinators check visa rules, electronic authorisations and passport-validity requirements for more than 200 nationalities in real time, while its concierge team can fast-track group or last-minute applications—an invaluable safety net when corporate itineraries overlap with holiday surges like the one just witnessed.
For global-mobility and travel-risk managers, the numbers matter. First, they confirm that Hong Kong has regained critical mass as a hub: executives visiting clients can once again expect near-normal flight frequencies and on-the-ground services. Second, peak-season staffing models must be reviewed—border agencies proved they can ramp up, but private-sector employers should build buffer time into itineraries that coincide with Mainland public holidays.
Looking ahead, officials are trial-ling a real-time “Easy Boundary” API that will publish live waiting-time data from every land checkpoint. Once released later this quarter, multinationals will be able to feed those metrics directly into travel-approval systems, improving duty-of-care and allowing same-day re-routing when crowds spike unexpectedly.
Mainland Chinese travellers—helped by Beijing’s three-day New-Year public holiday—accounted for more than 740,000 of the arrivals, a 48 percent jump year-on-year. Non-Mainland markets delivered about 210,000 visitors, up 19 percent. To handle the surge, Hong Kong and Shenzhen immigration authorities temporarily extended Lo Wu passenger services to 02:00 on 1 January and kept Shenzhen Bay open overnight, while the Security Bureau activated its Emergency Monitoring and Support Centre.
Operationally, the city coped well. Extra e-Channels and counters kept average clearance times below 20 minutes and transport operators added late-night buses and cross-boundary coaches. Hotel occupancy averaged 90 percent, and crowd-control plans around major attractions such as Disneyland, Ocean Park and the West Kowloon Cultural District were credited with preventing the bottlenecks seen during Golden Week last October.
In parallel, securing the correct entry documentation is still crucial. VisaHQ’s Hong Kong portal (https://www.visahq.com/hong-kong/) lets travel coordinators check visa rules, electronic authorisations and passport-validity requirements for more than 200 nationalities in real time, while its concierge team can fast-track group or last-minute applications—an invaluable safety net when corporate itineraries overlap with holiday surges like the one just witnessed.
For global-mobility and travel-risk managers, the numbers matter. First, they confirm that Hong Kong has regained critical mass as a hub: executives visiting clients can once again expect near-normal flight frequencies and on-the-ground services. Second, peak-season staffing models must be reviewed—border agencies proved they can ramp up, but private-sector employers should build buffer time into itineraries that coincide with Mainland public holidays.
Looking ahead, officials are trial-ling a real-time “Easy Boundary” API that will publish live waiting-time data from every land checkpoint. Once released later this quarter, multinationals will be able to feed those metrics directly into travel-approval systems, improving duty-of-care and allowing same-day re-routing when crowds spike unexpectedly.
