A report on ticket booking over China's Spring Festival holiday released by Chinese internet firm Qihoo 360 revealed that 72.5% of passengers chose regular trains in 2017, and only 27.5% booked high-speed train tickets.
However, a recent big data report indicated that this year, a higher percentage of passengers have chosen to travel by high-speed train.
China newly added 4,000 kilometers of rail to its railway network in 2018, 3,500 kilometers of which were for high-speed trains. The country had 3,819 pairs of trains in 2017, while the figure rose to 4,536 last year. Some 88% of the newly launched locomotives were bullet trains.
Six years ago, only 30.8% of tickets were sold through PC and mobile platforms, while in 2018 the percentage rose to 70, said a big data report jointly issued by news and information content platform Toutiao and China Railway.
Around 14 million tickets will be sold in a single day during the Spring Festival travel rush this year, with 80% of tickets distributed through online ticketing platform 12306, said Shan Xinghua, deputy chief engineer from the Institute of Computing Technology of China Academy of Railway Sciences Corporation Limited.
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