At present, the railway 12306 system has successfully passed the peak of ticket sales before the Spring Festival, and tickets for February 16 (the seventh day of the first lunar month) have been put on sale on February 2, ushering in the peak of ticket sales for the return journey after the holiday. Yang Lipeng, technical director of the Railway 12306 Science and Technology Innovation Center, answered questions related to the purchase of Spring Festival train tickets that the public is concerned about.
01 Why do some trains go on sale in seconds?
This year's Spring Festival travel is the first normalized Spring Festival travel after the smooth transition of epidemic prevention and control, and passengers have a strong willingness to travel. Judging from the situation in the first nine days of the Spring Festival, the railway, as a popular means of transportation, is the first choice for passengers, and the average daily number of passengers has reached 11.834 million. During the Spring Festival transportation period, the railway department did its best to arrange transportation capacity, put all passenger cars into operation, and can provide up to 10.7 million passenger ticket seats per day (excluding reuse on the way), and the total capacity arrangement is the largest in history.
Despite this, tickets are still in short supply. During the peak period of the Spring Festival, passengers travel intensively, and the railway passenger flow has the significant characteristics of extremely concentrated, extremely unbalanced, and one-way flow. According to the analysis of the pre-holiday ticketing and standby situation, all the capacity of the railway has been put into use, but it is still unable to meet the large-scale ticket purchase demand of passengers in just a few days, and the contradiction between supply and demand is extremely prominent.
It is precisely because of the tight supply of tickets during the period that some institutional platforms take the opportunity to increase prices for profit by special means such as purchasing agents, grabbing tickets, and hoarding tickets, which further exacerbates the contradiction between supply and demand. Objectively speaking, the supply of rail capacity and train tickets is limited, and the demand cannot be fully met during peak periods.
02 How to standardize the order of ticket purchase and maintain the fairness of ticket purchase?
The railway department has been committed to providing a limited number of train tickets to passengers in a fair, just, convenient and safe manner, and the order of ticket purchase has become increasingly standardized. However, some platform institutions regard the contradiction between the supply and demand of train tickets for the Spring Festival as a "business opportunity" to make money, and use special means such as "ticket grabbing software" to carry out the business of "grabbing tickets for profit", which seriously disrupts the order of ticket purchase, brings risks to the protection of passengers' personal information and the security of the railway 12306 system, and some also seriously damage the vital interests of passengers.
To this end, the railway department has adopted a series of containment measures to do its best to standardize the order of ticket purchase and maintain the fairness of ticket purchase. It has established an online verification mechanism between passenger identity information and the national issuing authority, and effectively standardized the registration and ticketing services of the 12306 platform, so that false identity information cannot be registered and ticketed. Strengthen the real-time monitoring and identification of behaviors such as purchasing agents, grabbing tickets, and hoarding tickets, and take measures such as directly rejecting requests or putting their needs at the end of the queue for abnormal behaviors. Since the sale of Spring Festival tickets, 64% of the total number of ticket purchase requests and 39% of the total number of standby ticket purchase requests have been identified and handled. The 12306 ticketing system was upgraded in advance, the bandwidth was expanded, and the ability to cope with high ticketing volume and technical prevention was further improved, ensuring the smooth operation of the website.
In order to make more profits, some "ticket-grabbing software" also create a variety of "acceleration package" concepts such as fast, lightspeed, and VIP, and engage in false propaganda, so that passengers mistakenly believe that purchasing the "acceleration package" service can improve the success rate of ticket grabbing. According to the analysis of 12306 background data, regardless of whether the "acceleration package" is purchased or not, the successful time of ticket purchase is the same.
"The online 'ticket grabbing software' can grab tickets by centralizing, and then do not pay for the return ticket or refund the ticket after payment, and then let the returned ticket meet the waiting needs submitted by yourself", in fact, the probability of grabbing tickets by this means is extremely low. Because the "ticket-grabbing software" submits the waitlist demand and eventually needs to enter the 12306 waitlist queue, and the waitlist of the 12306 system is cashed out in the chronological order of order generation, the ticket-grabbing software cannot adjust the waitlist demand in the back to the forefront, and the 12306 system can identify and dispose of the abnormal waitlist demand order through a variety of ways, and will not give priority to the ticket amount to meet the abnormal waitlist demand.
03 What is the essence of "having a ticket" on the "Ticket Grabbing Software" page?
Some "ticket-grabbing software" set up a large number of 12306 words on their relevant pages and function introductions, making passengers mistakenly believe that they have cooperated with the railway 12306 platform and the ticket amount is guaranteed. In fact, the 12306 platform has never cooperated with any third-party platform organization, nor has it allocated the ticket amount to any third-party platform for sale, nor has it made data links with any third-party platform.
The remaining ticket data displayed on the page of the "Ticket Grabbing Software" platform is crawled from the information displayed on the page of the 12306 platform, and then modified and processed. When the tickets for a certain train are sold out, the 12306 platform will display that there is no ticket for the train, but when it is displayed on the "ticket grabbing software" platform, it will be changed to "with a ticket", which is essentially for passengers to "buy a long time by a short time" and "buy a short time by a long time". The "ticket-grabbing software" induces passengers to set up multiple combinations of arrivals and stations, and adopts the method of "buying long and short" by spending more money and buying tickets for several stations in front of the actual arrival station, as well as the "buying short and long" method of buying short-distance tickets first and not getting off the train in violation of regulations. Set up additional small print prompts under "have a ticket", such as "buy a few more stops" or "you don't need to get off the bus and make up the ticket for the whole journey", etc., this kind of "ticket" does not really have a ticket from the departure station to the arrival station. "Buy a long ride by short" let passengers pay more, "buy a short ride by long", get on the train to make up the ticket may trigger the train overcrowding alarm, affect the safety of train operation, the railway department will be in accordance with the regulations to ask the "buy short and long" personnel to get off the train, passengers travel will be greatly affected.
In addition, the "ticket-grabbing software" also recommends unreasonable transfer schemes, so that its platform displays that there are tickets, and some transfer times are particularly short, and it is very easy for passengers to "miss the ride" when traveling, but the "ticket-grabbing software" does not consider these, and only considers the fees that can be earned by successfully purchasing tickets.
04 Is there only a long-distance ticket for train tickets during the Spring Festival?
The basic principle of railway ticket allocation is to take into account the convenience of passengers along the line to purchase tickets and make full use of railway capacity resources, taking into account the long and short distances. The allocation is mainly based on the historical passenger flow and ticket pre-sale at the departure station and each station along the way, giving priority to long-distance passengers who take the train from the departure station to the final station, and when there are long-distance tickets left, the ticketing system will adjust part of the ticket amount to the stations that are in demand along the way.
At present, in the national railway operation map, the proportion of short-distance passenger trains under the management of the railway bureau has reached 65%, and short-distance passengers have a large choice. The main reason for the phenomenon of "a large number of empty seats" on the existing trains found on the Internet is that these trains are either one-way return trains, or some seats reserved to take care of passengers at intermediate stations, or some trains with longer operating lines are not full of passengers in some sections.
Suggestions for purchasing tickets during the peak period of Spring Festival train ticket sales
Choose the official channel to purchase tickets
During the peak period of Spring Festival train ticket sales, it is recommended that passengers and friends choose the official channels of Railway 12306 (www.12306.cn, Railway 12306 mobile APP) to purchase tickets, and do not buy tickets on any other platform, so as to strictly prevent affecting personal itineraries, increasing travel costs, and leaking personal information.
Take advantage of the new features of Rail 12306
It is recommended to make full use of the new functions of Railway 12306, such as the subscription of starting sales reminders, pre-filling of ticket purchase requirements, standby ticket purchase, and ticketing area services for migrant workers and students, so as to improve the success rate of ticket purchase. When you can't buy the direct ticket you want, you can try to buy a connecting ticket on the 12306 platform and travel in sections. The railway authorities have launched transfer services at 120 major stations, allowing passengers to transfer without leaving the station.
Choose your travel time & mode of travel wisely
Due to the limited railway capacity and total ticket amount, it is impossible to meet the demand for concentrated travel of passengers during peak hours, so it is recommended that passengers choose off-peak travel or choose other modes of transportation during the peak period of concentrated travel.
Source: China Railway Railway 12306