Flights between China and South Korea remained at a high level in the past two weeks, supported by network expansion and rising demand, industry data showed on Monday.

Between July 27 and August 9, a total of 5,142 passenger flights were operated on China-South Korea routes, maintaining a high level of overall supply, industry data provider VariFlight told the Global Times on Monday.

Compared with the previous period from July 13 to July 26, when there were 5,145 flights, the number of operated flights decreased by just three, remaining essentially flat.

Compared with the same period in 2025, the number of flights grew by 10.7 percent. Flight operations during this period grew by 12 percent compared with the same period in 2019, indicating that current passenger flight volumes on China-South Korea routes have significantly surpassed pre-pandemic levels, VariFlight said.

The rising demand is also supported by more airlines and airports expanding their networks.

For example, Spring Airlines said that its current network includes four South Korean destinations: Jeju, Busan, Cheongju, and Seoul.

Following the introduction of the visa-free policy for South Korean passport holders, the carrier has witnessed a notable uptick in weekend trips to Shanghai, with Friday arrivals seeing a particularly strong uptrend. On the Busan-Shanghai route, Korean travelers have made up as much as 80 percent of passenger loads on Friday and Sunday flights during peak travel windows, Spring Airlines told the Global Times on Monday.

Jeju Air saw its passenger traffic increase by nearly 40 percent year-on-year during the first seven months of this year on routes between the two countries, the Yonhap News Agency reported on Monday.

From January to July, seat capacity on Jeju Air's South Korea-China routes grew by 26.8 percent year-on-year to 494,300 seats, while passenger traffic rose by 37.4 percent year-on-year to 427,300 travelers, and the load factor climbed 6.6 percentage points to 86.4 percent.

Eastar Jet, a South Korean low-cost carrier, announced on Friday that it had launched a new route between Incheon and Hohhot with two flights per week, Yonhap reported.

The expansion of flight routes between China and South Korea is a reflection of both warming bilateral relations and rising demand in tourism, business, investment, and people-to-people exchanges, Da Zhigang, a researcher at the Heilongjiang Provincial Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Northeast Asian Studies, told the Global Times.

He said that visa-free policies and travel facilitation measures, with tourism acting as a bridge for broader exchanges and trade, have paved the way for this expansion.

Data from Qunar.com showed that South Korea ranked first in the inbound source market rankings for the first half of 2026, followed by Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam.

While South Korea is already China's largest source of foreign tourists, even more of its nationals have been making trips to their western neighbor in recent months. About 1.7 million South Koreans visited China in the first half of this year, up 16 percent from the same period last year, scmp.com reported on Saturday, citing figures from South Korea's Ministry of Justice.

Yanji Chaoyangchuan International Airport expanded its South Korean route network to six destinations including Busan, Cheongju and Daegu with 668 monthly flights and a daily peak of 26 flights carrying 4,115 passenger trips in July. The airport ranked first in Northeast China for South Korean passenger traffic in July.

On May 16, Qingdao Airlines increased the frequency of its Qingdao-Seoul route, with flights operating three times per week. After this increase, average daily passenger flights from Qingdao to South Korea reached 18, of which 16 served Seoul on a daily basis.