Relax - Huge traffic freezes China's rail website

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SHANGHAI - Chinese people planning trips home for the upcoming Chinese New Year, which begins on Jan 23, may have been pleased to learn of the railways' new online ticket booking, but excitement has turned to frustration with huge Web traffic paralysing the system.

The new system was set up after the railway ministry was embroiled in a massive corruption scandal last year.

In Shanghai, a college student named Yang wrote in an online forum that he paid more than 200 yuan (S$41) for a ticket, but the booking website failed to place his order. He tried a second time and was successful, but he had to pay again, and he would have to wait to get that extra money back.

At least a dozen posts on online forums detail experiences similar to Yang's. Many other posts said the railway's telephone ticket hotline is easier to use and more reliable.

Meanwhile, the crowds at train stations are continuing to grow. The number of people waiting to buy tickets at stations in Guangzhou, southern Guangdong province, has increased dramatically in recent days, according to Chinese media.

China Railway Customer Service Centre told China Daily on Monday that it is trying to solve the problems and will return any extra payments within 15 working days.

A China Daily reporter logged onto the booking website, www.12306.cn, on Monday afternoon and tried without success to buy a ticket.

The site was noticeably slower than before and responded "system busy" after an order was made for a ticket from Shanghai to Guangzhou. Later attempts were met with the same response.

"The problem is because the current online purchase policy requires buyers to pay for the tickets within 20 minutes of booking them. If the website gets the payment any later, the ticket is put back with the unsold tickets to be sold again," the Ministry of Railways said on Monday.

Mr Fan Yingshu, director of the transportation department of the Beijing Railway Bureau, said last Friday that problems between banks and payment platforms caused the delay in payments. To prevent such problems, the ministry said on Monday it has been working on extending the payment time.

Efforts are also being made to boost the website's network bandwidth to allow it to handle more traffic.

Online ticket sales are a new service the ministry introduced for this year's chunyun - a period of heavy travelling around Chinese New Year when typically about two billion trips are made. The service is intended to spare many travellers the not uncommon experience of waiting in line overnight in the cold of winter to buy train tickets. But the system's vulnerability has become a hot topic online.

"I was excited by the news at first, figuring it would make buying train tickets much easier. But now it seems the effort is just window dressing," said a netizen named "Acar".

Railway officials should have had the foresight to build a stronger system, anticipating the enormous demand the site would have to handle, Acar said.

Huge traffic freezes China's rail website

China Daily, ANN | Wed, Jan 4 2012

Many planning trips home for Chinese New Year frustrated by inability to book online.

Huge traffic freezes China's rail website

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