SHANGHAI -- Tourism during China's weeklong National Day holiday disappointed again this year as many would-be travelers stayed home due to recent coronavirus outbreaks.

Only 515 million domestic trips were made between Oct. 1 and Thursday, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism said Thursday, down 1.5% from a year earlier and 29.9% from the pre-pandemic year of 2019.

The decline added to signs of a consumer spending slump in the world's second-largest economy, which is also hampered by the impact of power interruptions on industry.

Tourism revenue during China's Golden Week shrank 4.7% from last year to 389 billion yuan ($60.2 billion) and plunged 40.1% compared with 2019.

The first day of the holiday brought an estimated 63.02 million trips, the Transport Ministry said, as measured by the number of people traveling on the nation's transportation systems such as rail and aviation. That figure was down 3.1% from a year earlier and by 30% from 2019.

The National Day holiday marks the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Tourist traffic was brisk in major destinations such as Beijing, where the Universal Studios Beijing theme park opened just before the holiday. But the COVID-19 outbreaks around China in recent weeks chilled travel between cities and provinces. A cluster of cases linked to the delta variant was discovered during late August in Fujian Province, and pockets of infections later emerged in other parts of the country.

Many people chose to visit the cinemas instead.

Box office receipts during the week topped 4.3 billion yuan as of Thursday night, data provider EntGroup said, surpassing the year-earlier take of roughly 3.7 billion yuan. The receipts approached the 4.4 billion yuan made during the 2019 National Day holiday.