Golden Week is a bi-annual national holiday in China that lasts 7 days.

It occurs in January or February, to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year, and then again on the 1st of October to celebrate National Day. 

During Golden Week, Alibaba saw a big surge of in-store transactions overseas compared to last year. In fact, Alibaba’s Chinese users made 8x more overseas instore transactions in 2017 than 2016. 

According to Alibaba, Asian countries are the most popular tourist destinations for Chinese travellers, according to transaction volumes.

Compared to last year during Golden Week:

• Transaction volume in Singapore grew by 30x
• Transaction volume in Japan grew by 16x
• Transaction volume in Taiwan grow by 13x
• Transaction volume in Hong Kong grew by 13x
• Transaction volume in Thailand grew by 6x

Outside of Asia, Alibaba also experienced growth:

• Transaction volume in Australia grew by 20x
• Transaction volume in New Zealand grew by 6x
• Transaction volume in Europe grew by 6x

But where in Europe?

40% of transactions happened in Germany, 23% happened in the UK, 22% happened in France, and 5% in Italy, where Alipay launched in April. 

Alipay have also annouced that per capita spend grew buy 50% to 1,301 RMB. Surprisingly, europe led the way with higher than average spend where users spent an average of 3,150 RMB through alipay. Switzerland saw the highest per capita spend of 36,289 RMB of any country, over 10x the average for europe.