Buying Train Tickets in China
Buying train tickets in China is not as easy one might think it should be. In fact, I would call it an interesting chore. On one of my last days in Shanghai, I told my friend – “wo xu yao mai yi zhan ho che piao” which basically told him that “I need to buy a train ticket”. Originally, the people at the hostel were supposed to buy my train ticket for me and I would pay an extra 20RMB for this service. I left money with them and they told me it wasn’t possible to get a ticket. Instead of waiting around for the guy who was supposed to buy the ticket for me, I decided my time would be better spent talking a nap after an exhausting day of walking around, so now I was hoping that the train was not really sold out. There are several factors to consider when buying a train ticket in China.
First, you must wait until reservations open up for the day you want to travel. Depending on the train number (D vs Z vs T), this means you can actually buy the tickets anywhere from 5-20 days before the day of travel.
Second, there is no centralized reservation system for train travel in China. This is definitely a rather limiting factor. It makes buying tickets online impossible. For those who say it is possible to buy train tickets on the internet, you are merely paying someone to go to the ticket office on your behalf and you may not even get your ticket even if you book the ticket on the internet. The other limiting factor is that in many ticket offices it is not possible to book a return ticket to another city. For example, if I am in Xi’an and buy a ticket to Beijing. I can not buy a ticket from Beijing to Shanghai at the Xi’an ticket office.
Lucky for me, there were still soft sleeper top bunks available from Shanghai to Xi’an priced at 495 RMB. The hard sleeper cabins were all sold out. At roughly 70 USD, this was still considerably cheaper than the 99-135 USD I was seeing quoted by using the internet.
Ultimately, one of the lessons I have learned on this trip is that sometimes booking in person is cheaper than booking over the internet. This is definitely a reverse of what I have learned to use the Internet for in the U.S.
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