LettersHong Kong’s West Kowloon high-speed rail station misses the mark on China tickets

How come the MTR and the West Kowloon station cannot adapt and adjust their ticketing counters to match demand?

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A ticket counter at the West Kowloon station of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link. Too few counters to deal with passengers transferring trains in mainland China can be a recipe for impatient customers and tired staff. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 1:00pm, 27 Mar 2019Updated: 1:00pm, 27 Mar 2019

Political thoughts aside, below are some thoughts and suggestions for the Hong Kong high-speed railway’s West Kowloon station to improve efficiency and overall user satisfaction. My family and I wanted to go Maoming, a city in Guangdong province that requires changing trains at Guangzhou if departing from Hong Kong, to visit our ancestors’ graves during the Easter holidays. As we weren’t the only ones in Hong Kong to have this thought, naturally we couldn’t get tickets via the various online methods – including purchasing via WeChat. As such, we decided to go old school, and visited the station in person to purchase tickets on a Sunday morning.

As going to Maoming requires changing trains at Guangzhou, we were told we had to line up at ticket counters numbered 3-5, presumably because only those ticket counters had access to the mainland China railway network. We had to line up for two hours in all before a helpful and overworked railway staff member could help us find a combination of trains from Hong Kong to Maoming that we were happy with.

To put this in perspective, the station had at least 20 other window counters and 20 automatic ticketing machines, with no one standing in line. As such, my question is: how come the MTR and the West Kowloon station cannot adapt and adjust their ticketing counters to match demand? I understand the ticketing system in Hong Kong and the one in the rest of China may be different – but surely there’s a workaround here.

Gabriel Lee, Wan Chai

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;} How come the MTR and the West Kowloon station cannot adapt and adjust their ticketing counters to match demand?

How come the MTR and the West Kowloon station cannot adapt and adjust their ticketing counters to match demand?