With the Spring Festival holidays approaching, many Chinese have signed up for travel packages to the United States, adding to a major source of US tourism.

Chinese and US travel agents closely monitor the burgeoning market of middle-class Chinese families heading for trips during an otherwise slow winter season for US tourism.

The California Travel and Tourism Commission, the state's official travel promoter, and four Chinese tourism companies have jointly launched a project with the goal of attracting 1,500 Spring Festival vacationers from China.

The bigger objective is to make California the top destination for Chinese travelers during Spring Festival, says the commission's president, Caroline Beteta. Spring Festival, also known as Chinese New Year, begins on Feb 10 this year and lasts a week.

Preliminary figures show that Chinese citizens made more than 80 million trips to other countries in 2012, says Dai Bin, president of the China Tourism Academy.

On the other side of the ledger, China saw a steady inflow of foreign tourists, Dai says.

Around the world, people made an estimated 1 billion trips to foreign lands in 2012, with China on its way to becoming the No 1 source of cross-border tourism, according to the United Nations' World Tourism Organization.

The US remains a popular destination for globe-hopping Chinese, and the important Chinese New Year holiday is a busy time for travel.

In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the city welcomed an estimated 41 million US visitors and 11 million international visitors in 2012. Helping drive the upward trend are tourists from China, whose numbers have surged by 442 percent since 2006, according to NYC & Co, the city's official tourism promotion arm.