Technology helps ease Lunar New Year travel crush, but not everyone benefits
Online booking websites and ride-hailing apps are doing their part to make the annual Spring Festival travel rush less onerous for hundreds of millions of Chinese, but not everyone can master the technology
It is 10 degrees below freezing in Beijing and Wang Yonghai, a construction worker from Songyuan in northeastern Jilin province, is queuing up in the blustery wind to buy a train ticket home for Lunar New Year.
The week-long public holiday, which falls in mid-February this year, is the most important festival in the Chinese calendar, a time when families reunite and share a meal to usher in the new year. Family members, no matter how far-flung, make almost superhuman efforts to reach home, at times enduring what would pass as gross indignities in other countries.
While technology is making the booking of tickets more convenient from the comfort of an office or home or from a smartphone, Wang ranks among those who are not benefiting.
“Do I look like someone who knows how to buy tickets online and collect via automated machines?” said Wang, 63, smiling sheepishly as he lined up at Beijing railway station. “I am just too old, too old for a job, and too old to learn how to play with my phone.”
China Railway has allowed online booking of its tickets via its official website and widened the payment options to include both Alipay and WeChat Pay, the two most popular mobile payments platforms. It’s not all bad for Wang, however, as the lines are now shorter because of mobile booking.