More people torn over Spring Holiday travel

With Spring Festival just around the corner, whether to go home or not has become a hard choice for many people who work outside their hometowns.

An online survey was conducted recently by Shanghai-based Jie-fang Daily and QQ Survey among 600 people who work in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and who decided not to return to their hometowns for Spring Festival holidays this year.

About 21 percent of the respondents said they will not go home because the journey is too tough, and 18 percent said they cannot return because of their working schedule, while 17 percent have invited their parents to the cities where they work. Other people who cannot make it home cited difficulties in buying tickets or bad working performances, the newspaper said.

It is reasonable for people not to go home due to financial problems, but some people are also attaching less importance to family get-togethers during traditional festivals, said Gu Jun, a professor of sociology with Shanghai University.

People who go home for the festival also have difficulty in deciding where to spend the holiday.

Another survey conducted by the Beijing News on Thursday among 100 non-local couples working in Beijing and coming from different areas shows 30 percent couples have argued over spending the festival at the husband's or wife's home.

Though it is a tradition that couples spend Spring Festival at the husband's home, recent years have seen more disputes among young couples because most of them are the only children in their families, Shu Xin, vice director of China Social Work Association Working Committee on Marriage and Family, told the Global Times.

Shu advised couples to spend this year's festival at one side's home and spend the next one at the other's.