Tickets to Palace Museum to Be Sold Online Only

2017-05-13 ThatsBeijing

By Justine Lopez

The Palace Museum is going paperless – at least when it comes to tickets it is. As soon as this year, museum-goers will only be able to purchase tickets online, and old-fashioned paper tickets will be a thing of the past.

According to museum director Shan Jixiang, the new system will ease coordination and help spread out the number of daily visitors to the wildly popular tourist attraction, China Daily reports.

The museum is one of – if not the most – visited attraction in China. Over 16 million people went to the Palace Museum in 2016. Because of the sheer number of people who flock to the site every day, museum officials capped the number of daily visitors at 80,000 in 2015 due to safety concerns.

Museum officials believe that selling tickets exclusively online will allow them to have more control of the number of hourly visitors, which should ease overcrowding.

READ MORE: Beijing Will Soon Be Home to a Second Palace Museum

The new system will go into effect in an "appropriate time after late October." However, although no firm timeline has been set, it is expected that the new plan will likely be launched by the end of this year.

The number of available paper tickets sold by ticket vendors will be decreased starting in July.

Tickets to the Palace Museum started being sold online in 2011. Under the current system museum-goers can only purchase tickets for the next day. The new system will allow visitors to purchase same-day tickets, but only during offseason months from November to March.

According to Shan, Alipay and WeChat Wallet will be incorporated into the new online system, and the museum will coordinate with relevant online booking sites and mobile apps.

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"For those people who are not familiar with online payments, we'll leave some windows of box office open to help them," he said.

The online system will also be available in English to accommodate foreign tourists.

It is currently estimated that over half of all tickets sales come from online sales. So far in 2017, the number of physical tickets has decreased by roughly 10 percent compared to last year.

[Image via Global Times]