The Chinese people have started to scramble for their coveted train tickets back home for family reunion during the spring festival.
Train tickets for Chongqing, Hankou and Xi’an have fallen short, railway authorities said.
Virtually no tickets are available for the train tickets heading for Chongqing and Xi’an between February 1 and 8.
Passengers are able to buy train tickets online or by phone 30 days in advance of their travel. They can book their tickets on Jan 17 for train tickets of the Chinese New Year’s Eve, which falls on Feb 15 this year. Passengers can book their tickets on Jan 23 for train tickets of the sixth day of the first lunar month, the date when the Chinese people are supposed to get back to work after the week-long holiday.
To ease the ticket buying process, China's railway customer service center - 12306.cn - added WeChat Wallet as a payment method on Nov 23. Passengers can now use WeChat to pay for the tickets. They can also check the train status after linking 12306.cn account to their WeChat.
China's transportation system has to undergo a challenge during every Spring Festival holidays, which sees a huge number of people take to the roads for family reunions. To have reunion dinner with their families on Chinese New Year's Eve, those who have worked or studied away from home scramble to leave for their hometowns by all means -- train, coach, airplane, ship, self-driving, motorcycles and even bicycles, making the largest annual human migration in the world. Chinese Lunar New Year, or the Spring Festival, falls on Feb. 16 this year, making the holiday travel period spanning from February 1 to March 12.
In 2017, 357 million rail trips were made during the 40-day Spring Festival travel rush between Jan 13 and Feb 21, marking a new record of human migration during the Spring Festival travel rush.
