Passengers heading home for the spring festival holiday have started to snap up train tickets that have fallen short of supply due to the soaring demand.
A survey on 12306, China’s official train booking website, shows that train tickets for Chengdu, Chongqing, Xi’an and other hot destinations have almost sold out.
Due to the limited number of train tickets, many passengers turn to ticket-snatching software, which can automatically buy tickets on the booking website, boosting their odds of landing a ticket.
In a simulated scenario, our staff reporters started to snap up tickets with the software. The time was set at 8 in the morning at Nanjing Railway Station and Nanjing South Railway Station, 1:30 at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station and 2:30 at Shanghai Railway Station. Passengers who fail to get their coveted tickets in Nanjing are advised to snap up tickets on the trains departing from Shanghai but get aboard in Nanjing. Our staff reporters made it to landing the tickets in 15 minutes on the trains departing Shanghai Hongqiao and heading for Chengdu, Chongqing and Xi’an.
In the meantime, a new function of China's official train ticket booking website is expected to boost buyers' chances of obtaining a ticket during the upcoming Spring Festival travel rush.
The new function developed by a research team for 12306.cn, China's official online train ticket booking system, is able to automatically allocate canceled train tickets to other buyers who have paid in advance when tickets have sold out.
The new functionwill help buyers obtain a canceled ticket faster than using ticket-snatching software.
The new function of 12306.cn will save passengers the trouble of refreshing the website repeatedly to wait for canceled tickets. In most occasions, they fail to land a ticket because ticket-snatching plug-ins are faster.
According to estimates, nearly 60 online platforms rolled out such software in the 2018 Spring Festival holiday, a traditional occasion for family reunions when hundreds of millions of Chinese head home and a hectic time for the country's public transportation system.
The spring festival travel rush, or Chunyun in Chinese,is called "world's largest migration. The travel rush for 2019 will last from January 21 to March 1. It is estimated that 410 million passengers will be travelling by trains during the 40-day-period, also known as chunyun.
(Source：ourjiangsu.com)
