The Spring Festival is approaching, and the reunion of hundreds of millions of families is calling for tourists returning to their hometowns. However, this year's Spring Festival travel seems to have set off a heated discussion about the difficulty of finding tickets. According to **, the demand for passengers during the Spring Festival travel period will be as high as 4800 million people, and the average daily number of people is as high as 12 million, a year-on-year increase of 379%。This is a staggering figure, and it also raises questions about the problem of buying tickets.
12306, a platform that has attracted much attention during the Spring Festival season, has become the object of netizens venting their dissatisfaction. Many people are waiting to buy tickets on 12306, but they find that they can't buy tickets at all, but they are like fish in water on third-party platforms such as Ctrip and Fliggy. This has raised a lot of questions, and some people wonder if 12306 deliberately undersold tickets and left a large number of tickets to third-party platforms. However, we need to look at this phenomenon with a more rational lens.
First of all, we need to understand the principle of maximizing the capacity of high-speed rail. During the Spring Festival, 12306 does not pursue the logic of first-come, first-served, but pursues the maximization of capacity. This means that tickets for many stopovers are relatively difficult to buy, while long-distance tickets for the entire journey are relatively sufficient. Users reported that after entering the system when purchasing tickets, they quickly became standby, and there was no real ticket grabbing process at all. However, if you set the ticket section to the beginning and end of the entire train, you may find that there are still tickets within this range. This is because high-speed rail pursues an ideal state during the Spring Festival, where no position is empty from beginning to end. 12306's strategy is to prioritise the ticketing needs of passengers throughout the journey, in part to maximize capacity.
However, this strategy has also sparked some controversy. Some people believe that this is not really capacity maximization, but the pursuit of revenue maximization, which has led to a significant drop in capacity. Passengers at intermediate stations are forced to buy full-journey tickets, and when they get off the train, this capacity is not released, creating a kind of vacant capacity that does not meet the real passenger demand. This one-size-fits-all approach is considered too simplistic and requires more room for optimization.
In the process of purchasing tickets, users also have to face the trouble of fighting for speed and time. Compared with individual users, third-party platforms such as Ctrip can more easily obtain ticket information through technical means, and display and sell it on their own platforms. Losing to the computer has become a headache for many users. Normally, a ticket will be occupied for 10 minutes, and if payment is not made within this time, the ticket will be re-invested. Individual users often keep refreshing when they are waiting, and even if they occasionally swipe a ticket, they have already missed it when they click in. Third-party platforms such as Ctrip cleverly obtain ticket information through the 12306 interface, add real ticket buyers to the queue of standby orders, and sell refunded tickets according to the order of standby orders, which greatly improves the success rate of ticket grabbing. Although this kind of technical means does not violate the rules, it does leave individual users in the dust.
Third-party platforms have also adopted a strategy of buying short and making up for long. Under the principle of maximizing the capacity of high-speed rail, in many cases, there are tickets for the whole journey, and there are no tickets at intermediate stations. However, sometimes there are cases where there is a ticket for the intermediate station and there is no ticket for the whole process. Third-party platforms use big data technology to detect the possibility of tickets at these intermediate stations, which ordinary passengers may not be aware of. By allowing users to buy tickets for intermediate stations and prompting users to "don't get off the train during the whole journey, pay the ticket for 7 stops to the destination", the third-party platform successfully takes advantage of the characteristics of high-speed rail that does not easily drive people to get off. This kind of behavior is called "buying short to make up for long", and although it takes advantage of the loopholes in the rules of high-speed rail, it has also caused some controversy. Recent reports show that high-speed rail is introducing new rules that make it clear that no seat ticket can not sit or stand in first class and business class, and even for second class seats, if they are seriously overloaded, they will clear out passengers who "buy short and take long".
In addition to these reasons, ticketing challenges can also be related to factors such as cached data being out of sync, ticket purchase requests being intercepted, and so on. Sometimes the information of the third-party platform is also crawled from 12306 through scripts, and the delay in updating may lead to discrepancies in the remaining ticket information. At the same time, some security software may mistakenly intercept the ticket purchase request, resulting in a ticket purchase failure. In addition, some third-party platforms may deliberately create some false ticket-grabbing information in order to guide passengers to purchase value-added services. All these reasons make it more complicated and difficult to buy tickets.
In this contest of buying tickets for the Spring Festival, 12306, as a key platform, is also constantly adjusting and improving. In November last year, the affiliated company applied for a patent for "a method and system, equipment and storage medium for preventing automatic ticket grabbing", hoping to solve the problem of ticket grabbing through technical means. It is believed that in the near future, the problem of purchasing tickets for the Spring Festival will be alleviated to a certain extent. At the same time, we also expect the 12306 platform to take action in a more timely manner, solve the problem of ticket grabbing through big data and artificial intelligence, and provide a more convenient and fair ticket purchase experience for the majority of passengers.
To sum up, the problem of ticket purchase during the Spring Festival transportation period is a complex and deep-seated problem, involving the maximization of high-speed rail capacity, the technical advantages of third-party platforms, ticket purchase strategies and other aspects. Only through the joint efforts of all parties can a more reasonable and effective solution be found. I hope that in the future, more passengers can go home for the New Year with peace of mind and smoothness.
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