Riders of trains in China, rejoice! China’s state-run 12306 train ticket sales site, which has a total monopoly on online ticket sales despite being buggy and inefficient, has finally consented to team up with a competent ecommerce company (Alibaba). This is something I’ve been begging them to do for years, and now that it’s finally happened, all I can think is this:
The details of Alibaba’s collaboration with 12306 have not been officially made public yet, although Alibaba has confirmed that the partnership is real. In fact, the government site has reportedly already moved some of its services onto Alibaba’s cloud to allow for greater stability during peak purchase periods. Discussions between the two sides are said to have begun around a year ago, with both sides finally agreeing to move full steam ahead after a test run during the National Day travel period went smoothly. For this upcoming Spring Festival, Techweb reports that 12306 has shifted 75% of its ticket-checking services onto Alibaba’s cloud.
To understand why this is such good news for Chinese travelers, you have to understand just how much of a debacle it has been to date. It broke during its first Spring Festival rush back in 2011, and since then has been the source of a litany of complaints: not processing refunds, cheating customers, promising an app that didn’t materialize for years and thensucked when it finally showed up, breaking again, listing nonsensical departure/arrival times, being associated with corruption, facilitating ticket scalping, shutting down third-party services that fix its bugs, and more. Oh, and did I mention that this buggy nightmare somehow cost nearly US$100 million in government funds to build? Yeah.
Of course, partnering with Alibaba may not solve all of 12306’s woes. At least for the moment, it seems that Alibaba is likely just in charge of some of the technical back-end stuff, which likely means the site will be more stable and reliable but its user experience is likely to be just as ugly and inefficient as ever. If you’re wondering what I mean by that, take a look at the site for yourself.
Still, we know Alibaba is capable of handling tons of traffic well, which means this partnership is at the very least a good start.
Photo by Travel Our Planet
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