Every year before the Spring Festival, millions of people expect to travel during the holiday. Recently, many people have turned to car rental. In the run-up to the forthcoming Spring Festival, the car rental business is booming, especially with the new policy limiting car buying and skyrocketing parking fees in Beijing. More and more people are starting to rent cars for commuting.

With Beijing's recent restrictive policies on car purchasing, buying a car is becoming significantly difficult for local residents. But this has led to a boom in car rental, which is gaining traction in the capital.

According to some car rental companies in the city, they have recently been receiving around one customer every ten minutes during the afternoon rush hour. Although the clerks are scheduled to be off work at 8pm, these days they have to work overtime till 10pm.

Qian Yeya is Vice-president of car rental company China Auto Rental.

"Recently, we have seen an overall business boom in car rental, about 80 or 90 percent of our cars has been leased."

Qian Yeya says that as the lunar new year approaches, demand for cars has risen. Some rental companies have even lent out more than 90 percent of their 2,000 vehicles.

One customer says renting a car is more convenient. Whenever he needs to travel any distance, he simply rents a car.

Many car rental companies have branches around the country, for example, a customer who rents a car in Beijing can drive it to other province and stay there for a couple of months, but now with ever-increasing demand, businesses are restricting rentals outside Beijing, in order to cater to local needs.

In order to gain more customers, these car rental companies are seeking to expand their business. Wang Weijian is manager of a car rental company.

"We are thinking about purchasing more cars. Before the Spring Festival, we plan to purchase about 30 more cars, and after the festival, we will purchase more."

With Beijing's new policies to curb traffic, the city will issue only 240,000 new car plates this year to ease gridlock. Individual car buyers will receive a monthly average of 88 percent of the plates. As for the remaining 12 percent of the quota, 2 percent will be available for commercial use, while 10 percent will go to companies and government institutions.

According to the allocation scheme, car rental companies can only apply for plates from the 2 percent quota, or 4,8000 of the plates. And detailed allocation measures are yet to be released. Therefore, most car rental companies are deciding to wait before making any purchase plans. Here is Qian Yeya again.

"We are now still waiting for information of the detailed measures for plates allocation by the government. We don't dare to take any action in response to the new policy without detailed information."

With market prosperity, comes more competition. Some companies are offering large discounts of up to 50 percent, to attract customers, in this increasingly lucrative market.

For CRI, I am Zhang Wan.