Hong Kong residents made 69.7 million trips to the mainland for business and personal purposes last year with total spending rising to 29.1 billion HK dollars (3.73 billion U.S. dollars), up 10.8 percent on 2006, official figures released Monday indicated.

Of all the trips, 33 percent were business travel and 67 percent personal, said the Census and Statistics Department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government.

For personal trips, 54 percent were to neighboring Shenzhen city, 40 percent to other places in Guangdong Province and the remainder for elsewhere on the mainland.

About 38 percent were same-day trips while the remainder were overnight trips with an average length-of-stay of 3.4 nights.

The average spending per person was about 620 HK dollars. For personal overnight trips, each person spent about 820 HK dollars on average while for same-day trips people spent about 310 HK dollars. (One U.S. dollar = 7.7905 HK dollars)  

(Xinhua News Agency July 21, 2008)