Hong Kong’s Immigration Department has warned of an unprecedented surge in passenger volumes between 1 and 5 May, coinciding with the mainland’s Labour-Day Golden Week. Official forecasts released on 27 April project about six million crossings through the city’s sea, land and air control points—-roughly 1.5 million a day and 12 percent above 2025 levels.
![Hong Kong Immigration Braces for Six Million Trips During Labour-Day Golden Week]()
Companies and individual travellers who find themselves in need of last-minute mainland Chinese visas or other travel documents can save valuable time by using VisaHQ’s online service. The platform (https://www.visahq.com/china/) streamlines applications, offers courier collection and provides real-time status updates, ensuring paperwork doesn’t become another bottleneck during this hectic travel window.
Land routes will bear the brunt: some five million travellers are expected to use the Lo Wu, Lok Ma Chau Spur Line and Shenzhen Bay checkpoints alone. To cope, the department has frozen frontline leave, opened additional counters and, for the first time, set up a joint command centre with police, customs and the MTR Corporation inside Lo Wu station. Real-time data will feed directly into Shenzhen frontier inspection so officers on both sides of the border can synchronise channel openings. Travellers can monitor queue times via the Security Bureau’s “Easy Boundary” platform, which also aggregates shuttle-bus frequencies for the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge and the Huanggang cross-border coach. The MTR will run 13 extra train pairs per day on the high-speed West Kowloon–-Shenzhen Futian service from 30 April to 3 May. Employers moving staff between Hong Kong and their mainland offices should plan for longer surface-border transits, particularly on 2 and 3 May when daily volumes may top 680,000. Cargo operators have been asked to file manifests 12 hours earlier so customs can pre-clear shipments and avoid clogging passenger traffic lanes. The Golden Week operation is also viewed as a dry run for the Asian Games football qualifiers that Hong Kong and Shenzhen will co-host later this year, events that could see similar spikes in cross-boundary travel.
Companies and individual travellers who find themselves in need of last-minute mainland Chinese visas or other travel documents can save valuable time by using VisaHQ’s online service. The platform (https://www.visahq.com/china/) streamlines applications, offers courier collection and provides real-time status updates, ensuring paperwork doesn’t become another bottleneck during this hectic travel window.
Land routes will bear the brunt: some five million travellers are expected to use the Lo Wu, Lok Ma Chau Spur Line and Shenzhen Bay checkpoints alone. To cope, the department has frozen frontline leave, opened additional counters and, for the first time, set up a joint command centre with police, customs and the MTR Corporation inside Lo Wu station. Real-time data will feed directly into Shenzhen frontier inspection so officers on both sides of the border can synchronise channel openings. Travellers can monitor queue times via the Security Bureau’s “Easy Boundary” platform, which also aggregates shuttle-bus frequencies for the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge and the Huanggang cross-border coach. The MTR will run 13 extra train pairs per day on the high-speed West Kowloon–-Shenzhen Futian service from 30 April to 3 May. Employers moving staff between Hong Kong and their mainland offices should plan for longer surface-border transits, particularly on 2 and 3 May when daily volumes may top 680,000. Cargo operators have been asked to file manifests 12 hours earlier so customs can pre-clear shipments and avoid clogging passenger traffic lanes. The Golden Week operation is also viewed as a dry run for the Asian Games football qualifiers that Hong Kong and Shenzhen will co-host later this year, events that could see similar spikes in cross-boundary travel.
