China’s ride-sharing giant Didi Chuxing announced today that its Inter-City Hitch service completed over 30.67 million passenger trips during Chunyun (春运, the Spring Festival travel period, from February 1 to March 12 this year) that has just come to an end. The company saw nearly 90 thousand home-bound rides taking place in a single day on February 10th. And this year, the longest distance traveled on a single trip was from Harbin to Shenzhen, a 3391km journey.
Didi, one of world’s largest mobile transportation platform, launched the Inter-City Hitch (顺风车) service in 2015, this past Chunyun was the third travel rush that Hitch participated in. The company said the number of passenger trips completed this year was three times higher than the last two years combined… and that didn’t even take into account the 320,000 pets that were riding along with their owners.
Didi said this year’s passenger load was nearly half of what was completed by air travel. And the data shows that the Hitch service was the most popular among riders from Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Dongguan.
During the month-long travel rush, the Inter-City Hitch service had helped over 15.4 million passengers travel to remote areas and townships. Didi has been expanding its service networks from cities to smaller townships over the past year.
The annual travel rush, as always, is filled with stories and interesting facts. Didi’s carpool services provided a perfect opportunity for strangers who were heading back to the same hometown to chat and get to know each other—sometimes good things come out of it. According to Didi’s data, close to 62 thousand trips took place during the Spring Festival ended up free-of-charge and drivers from Chengdu were the most generous of all.