By noon Monday, many people at the Saigon Railway Station were exhausted after queuing for hours for tickets to travel for next year’s Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday.
Despite the fact that the SMS ticket booking service has been rolled out to smooth the path for train travelers, it appears joining the rush at the station is still the only sure-fire way to get a ticket home.
At Tet, which falls on January 26 next year, Vietnamese everywhere return to their families, even from abroad, after working away from home for a year.
Saigon Railway Station launched an SMS ticket service on November 15. The service is supposed to allow customers to send a message from their cell-phones to book a ticket. The train station is supposed to reply with a time for the customer to collect their tickets.
But many travelers have complained of technical problems when trying to book tickets through cell-phones.
“I had to get up at 4 a.m. to send a message to the service,” said Lan Anh, a student from the Ho Chi Minh City-based Open University. “But it was not until I sent a fifth text that I received a time to pick up the tickets.”
“My [slot] number is 508,” she said. “It is already 11 a.m. and the 308th customer has only just been able to collect their ticket. I have no idea when it will be my turn.”
Trang, a sophomore at the HCMC Economics University, said she began sending texts to the e-ticket service at 4:30 a.m.
“But I had to use three different cell-phone numbers and the message was only delivered on my 10th try,” Trang told Thanh Nien.
Trang said she had been waiting at the station for four-and-half hours and her turn was yet to come up.
To make matters worse, the www.vetau.com.vn website, which usually offers a pre-Tet online booking service, crashed on November 15 and has not been restored.
Saigon Railway Station head Nguyen Thi Thanh Phuong told Thanh Nien the SMS ticket service was just a last resort. She said the station would just be able to meet around 30 percent of passenger demand for tickets when it hits a crescendo a week before Tet.
The train is the most popular mode of transportation for Tet holidays as many consider long-distance road travel too time-consuming and unsafe and air travel too expensive.
Scalpers jump in
The logjam in the regular ticket booking service has created a lively black market in tickets, supplied by scalpers who buy tickets in bulk with the intention of selling them at a premium.
Last week, a Thanh Nien correspondent was asked for a VND170,000 (US$10) “commission” on each of the five train tickets to Da Nang he asked a scalper to supply.
Train tickets to Hanoi, usually VND900,000 ($53.2), attracted an additional VND220,000 each from scalpers.
A ticket dealer, identified only as C., said he could even deliver tickets to a customer’s home.
All the scalpers Thanh Nien met knew the train and fare schedules very well.
But many of them declined to give out their cell-phone numbers, fearing their shady business would be exposed.
Do Quang Van, deputy head of the Saigon Railway Station, said in recent days the security guards had suspected several people, who had bought tickets in bulk, of being scalpers.
The District 3 police, where the station is based, said they had questioned at least 15 scalpers. But the common practice was just to reprimand them, police said.
The station management said it will increase surveillance for scalpers by noting customers’ identity card numbers to ensure each person does not exceed the three ticket maximum.
Source: thanhniennews
No comments:
Post a Comment