Ticket sales for Spring Festival start at 12306.cn

A Fuxing bullet train departs from Shenzhen North Station. Courtesy of Shenzhen North Station

China Railway has started sales of tickets for the Spring Festival travel season at its ticket website www.12306.cn.

The 40-day Spring Festival travel season of 2025 will start from Jan. 14, 2025 and end Feb. 22.

According to rules, train tickets can be sold up to 15 days in advance, so the sales of tickets for Chinese New Year's Eve, which falls on Jan. 28, 2025 will begin Jan. 14. The sales of return tickets on the 7th day of the Lunar New Year, which falls on Feb. 4, will start from Jan. 21, and the return tickets for the Lantern Festival on Feb. 12 can be purchased starting from Jan. 29.

For this year’s Spring Festival holiday rush, the operator has introduced a new feature in its ticket sales system that automatically submits tickets purchase orders for buyers.

Train tickets for the Spring Festival travel season are now available on the China Railway ticket website www.12306.cn. Han Ximin

Buyers purchasing tickets between Dec. 30, 2024, and Feb. 8, 2025, for trains running between Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, and cities in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Sichuan, can pre-file orders in the ticket system. Each applicant can pre-file up to six orders, with each order containing a list of up to nine passengers.

Sixteen days prior to departure, the www.12306.cn ticket system will send text messages for users to adjust their preferred train priorities, confirm booking information, and choose whether to pre-pay for the tickets. Fifteen days before the departure when the tickets start sales, the system will automatically submit the orders based on the priority of the users. 

The submissions will be sequenced in chronological order along with other purchase methods. If the system successfully purchases the tickets, it will automatically refund any excess payment to the applicants. If the system fails to book the tickets, it will refund the entire payment without any charges.

China Railway will start new train schedules starting from Jan. 5, 2025.

According to the new schedules, Shenzhen North Railway Station will operate 992 trains including 14 newly added trains that depart from and terminate at the station. It will operate direct high-speed sleeper trains between Shenzhen and Guangyuan, Sichuan.