As the Chinese Spring Festival approaches, many people in the country are preparing to buy train tickets to return home to celebrate the holiday.
According to the Xinhua News Agency, an estimated 3 billion trips are expected to be made during this year's Spring Festival. Among them, 356 million will be made by train.
For most people, it is not easy to buy a train ticket home during the holiday period as tickets are in high demand.
As such, many third-party online platforms have provided fee-based services to help customers purchase tickets, using high-speed processors to grab the tickets online once they are released.
The Economic Information Daily has reported that in one case, the original price of a one-way train ticket from Guangzhou to Changsha on January 13 was 182 yuan, but the probability of purchasing the ticket, according to one online ticket vendor, was only about a half. However, if a customer pays a 66-yuan insurance fee and a 1,005-yuan "speed-up package", the probability of successfully purchasing the ticket would be increased to 85.86%. However, the final price would be nearly seven times higher than the original one.
In 2015, online travel service provider Ctrip made 4.5 billion yuan, or around 650 million U.S. dollars, in such service fees.
Many observers and travelers have questioned such practices, even calling the vendors ticket scalpers.
Guo Tianwu, a law professor at Sun Yat-sen University, said that train tickets are considered public resources managed by the state, and the third-party booking platforms are required to be licensed before offering ticket-purchasing services.
Xiong Daoyin, a lawyer in Chongqing, said these services fall in a legally grey area, as China does not have fully developed laws regarding them yet.
In 2013, a couple were arrested in Guangdong Province for offering similar services, but no online service providers have been known to be taken down by legal authorities.
