Hong Kong residents with plans to visit the Chinese mainland by high-speed rail have called for more online tickets and improvements to the online and offline ticketing process. The PARKER ZHENG CHINA DAILY Hong Kong residents who want to visit the Chinese mainland by high-speed rail have called for more online tickets and improvements to the online and offline ticketing process.
On the second day since long-haul high-speed rail tickets went on sale again, crowds gathered at Hong Kong's West Kowloon Station to buy tickets via counters and self-service ticket machines.
On Thursday, a large number of residents waited for hours at the station to buy tickets, many of whom plan to visit the mainland during the upcoming Qingming Festival and Easter holidays.
The number of daily trains will be increased to 164.
On April 7th, Hong Kong resident Tina Lee Mei-wingLee Mei-wing wants to visit Chaozhou of Guangzhou province, but found that all the online tickets for that day were sold out shortly after they were released on Friday.
She arrived at the station at 9 am to buy offline tickets and spent at least three hours in the queue. There were different ticketing queues - one for cross-border tickets for passengers departing Hong Kong and going directly to mainland cities, the other for a vending machine selling mainland tickets for passengers who need to travel between different mainland cities. Each type of ticket, the station has a quota of 1,500 tickets.
Lee said that the station lacks enough guidance to allow passengers to understand the difference, and that many people, including herself, chose the wrong queue and had to queue up again, which wasted a lot of time.
Christie Chow bought tickets for April 4th in Shanwei, Guangdong province, via a ticket machine at the station, after online tickets were sold out.
She said self-ticket purchasing was relatively convenient, and she only spent half an hour queueing up. She noted that buying a ticket in this way requires original personal documents and e-payment, which can cause problems for the elderly.
Some people purchased offline tickets through travel agencies. Diane Feng, who was unable to buy a ticket online, went to a travel agency in Hong Hum to avoid the crowds at the West Kowloon Station. She said that the agency did not charge an additional service fee for the ticket, but there are a lot of agencies that offer such ticketing services.
She still hopes more online tickets can be made available, which would benefit a greater number of residents, because of the offline channels that make it convenient for residents to buy tickets.
In addition to requesting that the number of online tickets be increased, residents have also called on the authorities to improve other arrangements with online purchasing, such as allowing passengers to use traditional Chinese when registering an account on the online platform, and fixing a problem that prevents some Hong Kong phone numbers from receiving verification codes.