Alipay’s After-Action Report for Golden Week 2017

China just had one doozy of a vacation recently, a holiday measuring one full week in length that gave Chinese citizens plenty of time to shop, relax, and enjoy some time with family besides. National Day Golden Week means a lot of opportunity, and a report sent our way from Alipay shows off just what happened during that impressive national vacation.

This Golden Week, Alipay noted, users actually transacted eight times the volume of business they did the preceding year, and Asia was the leader on the list of destinations by transaction volume. Hong Kong was the clear leader, followed by some of the major destinations like Thailand, Taiwan and Japan, among several others.

While every port of transaction was up this year, it was likewise clear that some were more up than others. Singapore, for example, saw 30 times the Alipay business seen the preceding year, and Japan saw 16 times the volume. Hong Kong may have been the leading destination, but it only did 13 times the business it did the preceding year.

That’s not to say places beyond Asia didn’t likewise do well; Australia saw 20 times the payment action, and New Zealand saw six times. A whopping 84 percent of all users involved were born in the 1980s or 1990s, and users put over 1.2 million e-coupons to work in that time.

In a way, this survey tells us nothing new; Alipay is a popular mobile payments system for the growing Chinese tourist class. Alipay has been working frantically to make it so, and has been setting up outposts for itself all over the world. Hotels, cruise ships, restaurants…pretty much anywhere a tourist would go, Alipay has been pushing to get itself in play therein. That’s a good move for Alipay, and you can see how well it’s working with these numbers. While there was some doubt that travelers would take to Alipay in large numbers, the numbers are large enough to reflect the validity of the concept.

While Alipay as a popular tourist tool isn’t news, the numbers of just how popular it has become certainly is. The plan has quite clearly come together, and Alipay is laughing all the way to the bank.