As the week-long National Day Holiday draws to an end, vacationers begin to return to their working places and serious traffic jams are expected on roads to big cities on Friday, the last day of the holiday.

Beijing Traffic Management Bureau said in a notice that peak time of traffic on expressways to Beijing would last more than seven hours and would not be eased until 9 pm Friday.

Traffic jams had in fact widely occurred on Thursday afternoon, especially on expressways of Beijing-Tibet, Beijing-Chengde, Beijing-Hongkong-Macao and the airport expressway. On the Hebei section of the Beijing-Tibet Expressway, vehicles queued up for tens of kilometers starting from 3 pm.

Other big cities like Shanghai, Guangzhou and Wuhan are also facing heavy traffic pressure. The 2011 Shanghai Tourism Festival, which closed on Thursday, attracted more than nine million visitors.

Statistics from the National Tourism Administration showed that on Thursday, the 119 tourism zones surveyed reported up to 3.1 million visitors, up 13.5 percent from the same period last year, among which Guangzhou enjoyed a growth of 207.91 percent to 295,600 visitors.