The summer holiday season started with a bang for China’s aviation sector, with passenger traffic at the country’s airports reaching almost 9 million — about the population of Switzerland — in the first five days of July.

Free from grueling COVID restrictions at last, Chinese travelers are seizing the moment. July 1-5 passenger traffic at airports was 14% higher than in the same period in 2019, before the COVID crisis, data from travel platform Trip.com Group Ltd. show.

Expensive airfares aren’t a deterrent either. The average price for domestic tickets was 21% higher on average than at the start of July four years ago, and 22% higher for international routes, according to Trip.com.

It’s welcome news for the country’s airlines, which are bringing back thousands of flights and riding high on the stock markets. The so-called Big Three of Air China Ltd., China Southern Airlines Co. and China Eastern Airlines Corp. all logged their biggest gains in more than a year on Monday last week — the first trading day of the month — with each jumping more than 6% in Hong Kong. Other travel-related stocks also soared, including Changbai Mountain Tourism Co., which rose the 10% limit, and BTG Hotels Group Co., up 7.3%.

Travel within China is the most popular — the lingering legacy of COVID and a lack of international flights, a slower economic recovery and high youth unemployment aren’t conducive to overseas holidays. That’s reflected in Southeast Asian tourism statistics showing the number of Chinese visitors to five countries in the region in May was only 14%-39% of 2019 levels.

For domestic air passenger traffic, the Civil Aviation Administration of China has said it expects levels to be 7% higher this summer than in 2019.

China is a massive market for global aviation. Prior to COVID, it accounted for 9% of all international air passenger demand and 25% of domestic travel, according to the International Air Transport Association.

Videos and pictures on Chinese social media already show busy airports with long queues and crowds in tourism hotspots such as Beijing and Xinjiang in the country’s northwest. Some complain that airports are just as busy as typically packed railway stations, and that it’s hard to find a seat at departure gates.

On Xiaohongshu, a popular social media platform where people share fashion and travel tips, users suggest getting to airports three hours ahead of any flight considering how unusually busy the terminals are. Some have compared the early summer scenes to the Lunar New Year travel period in China, regarded as the biggest annual migration of people on the planet.