How To Buy Train Ticket Online in China
One of the biggest headaches for most China travelers over the years has been dealing with buying train tickets in China. It’s not like you can buy them months in advance like you can with airline tickets so it feels like you are leaving a part of your planning up to chance and that is never funny (rules have changed in since 2015 such that travelers can purchase tickets up to 60 days in advance).
Thankfully that doesn’t have to be the case and I’m going to show you two of the easiest ways to buy your train tickets online. I have personally done both of these methods and can tell you with confidence that they both work extremely well as long you know what you’re doing.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
There are basically only two ways to buy train tickets online- through the China Railway Bureau website or via a 3rd party travel company. The latter will come with an additional fee but might be your only (and best) option.
Buying through the China Railway Bureau website requires that you meet the following:
1: You’re comfortable reading Chinese (the website has no English Version).
2: You must have Chinese Bank account.
If those two above statements apply to you, you good otherwise let’s go for other option which I am about to explain.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
To begin, you need to open the website which is obvious using either Internet Explorer or any other browsers. I personally use Chrome for my daily browsing, but in this case you will need IE.Once you open the homepage for 12306.cn, click on the button that reads 新版售票 (xin ban shou piao) on the left sidebar.
This will bring you to a secure page (sometimes foreign-based web browsers won’t recognize the security certificate but click “Proceed Anyway). On this page you need to type in the cities between which you will be traveling and the date you wish to leave. You will need to use Chinese characters to input the city names and there is an option at the bottom for students ticket prices if that applies to you.
What you see here is that two trains are available. In the table it will show which type of tickets are available on each train (i.e. hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper, soft sleeper). You don’t have to choose which one you want yet, just click on the train you wish to book using blue option on the right.
At this point the website asks you to login in order to continue. It’s not that hard to create a login but you will need to be quick. Using the guide you see in the screenshot, fill the blanks in with the following information:
Username｜this can be whatever you want it to be.
Password｜the website will tell toy the strength of your password and then you will need to retype the password again below.
Spoken Password｜just type in a memorable numbers (at least 6 digits), which will be used if you ever needed to call customer support. Retype the password again below.
Security Question｜there is a dropdown menu of questions that you can answer.
CAPTCHA｜type what you see in the small box.
Once you are finished with that, click the checkbox that says you agree with their terms of use and click Submit. The next page requires you to fill in more detailed information about the passenger (you) that will be purchasing the tickets. It is important that you have all of this information filled correctly or they may not let you on the train. The information they require includes:
Last name｜that would be you’re your family name on your passport.
Gender｜Male 男 or Female女.
Form of ID｜in the dropdown menu, you will need to choose passport 护照.
ID｜here is where you put your passport number.
Birthday｜What year/month/day were you born?
Email｜to confirm you tickets.
Cell phone Number｜again to confirm your identity.
Additional information｜are you an adult, kid, student or disable veteran. The rest of the information is not marked red so don’t feel like you need to fill out your address unless you want the tickets delivereddirectly to your door.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
once you have confirmed your ticket order you will then need to pay for the tickets. You want to find the pay online option (网上支付) and do this within half an hour of booking the tickets or else your booking will be lost. Because there are so many different ways to pay and I am not going to dive into all the details here I personally used my UnionPay card which I had already setup with my bank to allow online payments or else you can link your bank card to your wechat would be helpful to pay for anything.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
The easiest way, however, is to just arrive at the train station the day before or even a few hour before and go to what essentially amount to “will call” in the ticket hall. There are kiosks that can do this, but it doesn’t work with foreign IDs’ so you will need to unfortunately stand in line with the confirmation number they sent you via email and your passport to get your ticket. They will hand you your ticket and you’re good to go.
All of our weekly trips will be posted on our wechat official account, welcome to follow us