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| People queue all night on the floor of Seoul Station early Tuesday morning, waiting for the ticket reservations opening for the Seollal holiday. / Yonhap |
By Jhoo Dong-chan
The chaotic competition ― both online and offline ― for train tickets to hometowns for Seollal, or the Lunar New Year holiday, is repeated without fail around this time of the year.
Hundreds of people stayed up all night on the cold floor of Seoul Station, Monday, the day before the opening of ticket reservations.
On-site ticket booking at the station ran for two hours on Tuesday morning from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., but hundreds of people camped out the night before and more than 1,000 stood in long lines to buy tickets at the station despite the freezing weather.
"I came here around 11 p.m. Monday," said 33-year-old Seoulite Kwon Hyun-jin. "I needed to buy six tickets for this Seollal but I could not get all six."
Most of the people in line are those who are not good at online reservations, such as the elderly. "They prefer queuing up, saying they would rather stay up all night than trying to make online reservations," said an official from Korail, the state-run railroad operator, Thursday.
"We sell 70 percent of holiday tickets online and 30 percent through on-site ticketing, so the tickets are sold out soon," he said. "Those in the queue tell us to increase the ratio for offline booking, but it would be against the trend of more systems becoming online-focused."
Online booking
The online situation, however, was not much different.
Tickets were sold out in a couple of minutes Tuesday morning after online booking opened at 6 a.m., due to an overwhelming rush of customers. Many were put on a waiting list for 10 to 20 minutes but failed to book the tickets they wanted.
"There were some 10,000 people on the waiting list when I tried to log into the website 10 to 20 seconds past 6 a.m.," said an online user. "I waited for about 50 minutes and finally made it into the site but the tickets were already sold out. It was ridiculous."
Twitter user Eun Byul also rapped out a complaint, saying, "It is chaos every year. Some say Korea is the most wired country in the world but they are wrong. I couldn't even log into the site. I don't know if I can visit my family this Seollal."
The official said the site should have no problems as Korail expands the number of servers during the holiday booking season.
"The waiting and sellout happens because the number of tickets available is far short of demand."
He said it is almost impossible to increase the number of trains operating because Korail already offers additional service during holidays.
"Unless the nation builds more railways, it is impossible for us to expand operations as it is already at full capacity," the official said. "For now, such inconvenience will be unavoidable every holiday."
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