Free scenery tickets to revive suburban Beijing

Beijing will hand out 100,000 free tickets to tourist attractions while providing timely tourist information during the eight-day National Day holiday that starts Sept 30.

The free tickets - mainly for the scenic spots of Fangshan district in the southwestern outskirts of Beijing, badly hit during the heaviest rain in six decades this summer - are meant to attract tourists from the hot spots in the capital's downtown, while easing traffic pressure, according to the Beijing Tourism Development Committee.

The move will also help revitalize local scenic spots in the disaster-affected area, according to the committee.

The tickets will be issued as e-tickets on the website of the committee, Song Jun, publicity officer of the committee told China Daily.

The government will also set up a monitoring station to trace tourist information, including vehicle traffic and tourist numbers, to release forecasts and other important information during the upcoming holidays.

All information will be upgraded on the official website of Sina Weibo, a popular Twitter-like micro-blogging service in China, it said.

The degree of comfort in each tourism zone will also be detected.

As the capital joined a number of regions to scrap toll charges during the National Day holiday in an effort to free up passenger-car traffic during the annual travel peak, concerns have grown as more private vehicles will come out during the holidays and increase traffic congestion.

In response, local tourist attractions have come up with more parking spaces to meet the demand.

The Badaling section of the Great Wall has come up with about 2,500 temporary parking spaces, including 600 for the large vehicles during the holidays to ease the traffic tension.

More tickets booths will also be set up as an answer to the stream of tourists.

The upcoming National Day holidays, also known as Golden Week in China, will witness an estimated 362 million trips during the eight days, a year-on-year 20 percent increase, according to a report released by the China Tourism Academy last week.

According to the Beijing Landscape and Forestry Bureau, tourist complaint stations will be set up in the parks of the capital to better supervise issues like food-safety management and price control.