Shanghai’s secondary international gateway, Hongqiao Airport (SHA), has recorded more than 210 000 inbound and outbound passengers since 1 July, as the summer travel peak combines with a packed calendar of international conferences and youth study-tours. Border-inspection officials told The Paper that the airport processed over 970 international flights during the first three weeks of the month, up 1.2 percent on June. The traffic mix is shifting. Whereas business and VFR (visiting friends and relatives) traffic dominated early-2026 demand, July’s flows are led by family leisure, student ‘study camps’ and travellers heading to Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia and Hong Kong/Macau. Private- and charter-jet movements have also risen eight percent year-on-year as multinational executives seek to pair Shanghai meetings with factory visits in the nearby Yangtze River Delta. To cope, Hongqiao Border Inspection Station has introduced a real-time passenger-flow forecasting model that triggers flexible lane openings and redeploys inspection officers to match peak arrival banks. The airport has also streamlined handling for corporate jets, cutting clearance times for crew and passengers to under 15 minutes. For mobility managers, Hongqiao is once again a viable alternative to Pudong for regional itineraries: its downtown location reduces transfer times to central Shanghai by up to an hour. However, slot constraints remain severe; travel planners should secure bookings early and warn travellers of possible last-minute schedule adjustments caused by summer thunderstorms. Travellers needing special assistance continue to benefit from Hongqiao’s "Green Channel", while a volunteer team offers multilingual support to elderly and disabled passengers—an important consideration for organisations arranging accompanying-family travel.
Source: The Paper
