The Chinese Lunar New Year will come in around one and a half month, and whether it is possible to grab a train ticket during the Spring Festival has become a concern of many people. But the good news is coming now! 

© Image | Google

According to media reports, the technical staff of the Chinese Railway System Research and Development revealed that the “Automatic Ticket Purchase” function will be launched during the Spring Festival of 2019. The ticket grabbing situation will be greatly alleviated.

Pay the pre-purchase funds, the system will automatically purchase tickets for you.

 

During the Spring Festival of 2019, if passengers encounter the situation that the ticket is sold out. You can try this way after the system upgrade

Registering the ticket purchase information on the 12306 platform and pay the pre-purchase ticket funds, if there is a refund or a surplus ticket, the 12306 system will automatically purchase the ticket for you. 

Regardless of the ticket purchase speed or the success rate will be ahead of the third-party ticket-selling purchase platform.

The emergence of new features is bound to cause a big blow to the current ticket-selling software on the market.

You can still purchase tickets

 after 23:00

 

For the 12306 system that a great deal of people have been questioning, the problem of not being able to purchase tickets after 23:00. A staff of Chinese railway explained that in the face of huge ticket purchases and new software grabbing methods and even malicious attacks, the pressure on the server is heavy every day. 

© Image | Google

Therefore, after 23:00, the system need to be optimized, upgraded, and the data generated during the day is transferred to other servers overnight. So in this process, ticket sales cannot be performed.

However, the railway department is also considering the use of technical means to cancel the restrictions on the inability to purchase tickets after 23:00.

Spring Festival travel rush this year

 

The Spring Festival of 2019 is 5th Feb. 2019 while the first date of the spring festival travel rush is 21th, Jan 2019. Here’s the timetable for ticket-purchasing during that period.

Date	Date of the ticket  you can buy
23rd, Dec. 2018	21st, Jan. 2019
30th, Dec. 2018	28th, Jan. 2019
31st, Dec. 2018	29th, Jan. 2019
5th Jan. 2019	3rd, Feb. 2019
6th Jan. 2019	4th, Feb. 2019
7th Jan. 2019	5th, Feb. 2019
12th Jan. 2019	10th, Feb. 2019
21st Jan. 2019	19th, Feb. 2019

To use third-party platform with caution and beware of being deceived.

 

If you have stayed in China long enough, you must know that it’s really hard to purchase a train tickets during the Spring Festival travel rush. 

 

© Image | 新华网

 

However, some users still said that they used a number of ticket grabbing tools, paid a lot of money, but still did not get the ticket. To avoid property loss or impact on your travel, please use third-party systems with caution.

Reminder from the official platform

 

12306 official has been reminding passengers through official website, official customer service hotline, etc.: 

Do not purchase tickets through third-party purchasing websites or Apps, so as to avoid being impossible to apply for refunds or changes.

The railway department also reminds passengers not to provide personal information to third-party websites or Apps to avoid the risk of personal information disclosure.