China Railway Ministry Site Accused of Cheating on Ticket Sales

If you’re riding a Chinese sleeper train, you should know that not all bunks are created equal. The top bunk? That’s for chumps. It’s difficult to get to, gets super hot at night, and there’s not enough headspace for you to sit up. The middle bunk (in hard sleeper cars only) is better, but requires an even more awkward climb. The bottom bunk is where it’s at; at ground level it is super convenient to get to, and it’s often a gathering place for travelers during the day so anyone sitting there is sure to meet some new friends.

So you can imagine the frustration a Chinese train traveler experienced recently when he tried to buy a ticket for the bottom bunk over thirty times on 12306, the Railway Ministry’s ticket sales site, but kept getting top-bunk tickets instead. What’s more, he was buying soft sleeper tickets, which only have top or bottom bunks. The chances of being randomly assigned a top bunk ticket thirty times in a row? 0.000000093 percent.

It’s not possible that the bottom bunk tickets were sold out because the web ticket sales open two days before tickets are sold in person. In person, ticket buyers can usually request a specific bunk, but the web and phone sales systems are supposed to assign bunks randomly.

Needless to say, our traveler suspected that his results weren’t random, and that the bottom bunk seats had been held in reserve or something. He wrote an open letter, which was then posted to anti-fraud muckraker Fang Zhouzi’s weibo account.

But customer service representatives at 12306 have responded, saying that the service is entirely random and that it is not secretly reserving bottom bunk tickets for someone else. Given how unlikely — statistically speaking, virtually impossible — it is that a traveler could be randomly assigned to a top-bunk ticket thirty times in a row, it’s a bit hard to believe everything is working as intended. But there may not be foul play involved; 12306 has a history of being incredibly buggy, so that might well be what’s happening here.

[Beijing News via Sina Tech]