Society

Ticket sales go online

By Xin Dingding (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-06-13 09:43

BEIJING - Train tickets for the Beijing-Tianjin intercity railway went on sale online on Sunday, drawing the curtains on an upgrade to China's outdated method of selling train tickets.

The Ministry of Railways said in a statement that travelers can log onto www.12306.cn, the website for the China railway customer service center, to buy train tickets. The Internet portal is open from 5 am to midnight every day.

To buy tickets online, passenger should register themselves using ID cards or passports. Those coming from Hong Kong or Macao should register themselves using a mainland travel permit, while those coming from Taiwan should use permits that allow them to enter the mainland, the ministry said in a statement.

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Those who buy train tickets using ID cards can board the train directly just by showing those cards.

Things will be a bit more difficult, though, for those who buy tickets with the other three types of personal identification. Before being allowed to depart, they will first have to go to a ticket window at the Beijing South Railway Station and present both their identification papers and a ticket number obtained from the website.

Those who want a refund of what they paid for their tickets or want to reschedule their trips will have to go to the railway station's ticket windows two hours before they were supposed to depart.

The Beijing-Tianjin intercity railway is the first railway in China to sell tickets online.

A ministry spokesman said the online system will soon be adopted for the Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Railway, which is to open in late June. Travelers will be able go to the Internet to buy tickets for all of the railways in China by the end of the year.

The online sales are expected to make it easier for the public to buy tickets, he said, and help to prevent passengers from lining up at railway stations or ticket agencies.

By Sunday afternoon, some passengers were saying they had successfully bought train tickets from the website, although the process had not always gone smoothly.

Some netizens also found that foreigners, who must register themselves at the website before making a purchase, could not complete their registrations if they put a space between their first and last names when typing them in.

A ministry publicity official told China Daily on Sunday that the technical problem will be solved soon.

Many netizens went to the Internet on Sunday to praise the online sales. Some, though, worried that tickets will be difficult to buy during peak travel seasons, such as the traditional Chinese new year and the National Day holiday in the first week of October.

An insider was quoted by the Beijing Times as saying that the creation of an online train ticket system does not present a large number of technical obstacles. He said an important question will be over how many tickets will be sold online and how many will be sold at existing railway stations and ticket agencies.

The Ministry of Railways needs to adopt policies ensuring that there will be plenty of tickets for sale on the website to prevent travelers from being disappointed when they go online, the insider said.