How quickly time has passed, next week we leave for China. We just bought our train tickets to and from Yellow Mountain, forgoing the bus and flight options. Wow, it is not easy for a foreigner to buy train tickets for China.
There are plenty of sites to monitor train ticket availability, schedule, and ticket prices, but those same sites also charge a pretty hefty premium to use them to purchase tickets. We were about to use the more popular China train ticket site when our $42-$45 train ticket ended up being $60 after all fees per ticket. With 6 tickets (round trip), that's a total of $90 - $108 extra in fees. Seriously, the travel industry really takes advantage when they can. Luckily we ended up asking distant family living in China to purchase our train tickets from the site www.12306.cn, it's the official China rail site, but you need a Chinese credit card to be able to purchase, foreign credit cards are not accepted.
Before we went the route of having someone in China purchase tickets for us, I did notice the Chinese travel site, Ctrip now allows for train tickets to be purchased through them. They had that option removed in the past, but for the time being it works again. Their fee of 20 RMB (roughly $3 USD) is much more reasonable.
We thought traveling after the Golden Week there would be less tourist heading to Yellow Mountain, but surprisingly tickets for the soft sleepers were almost sold out. Not looking forward to the crowds, but the fact that we were able to get a great deal on our hotel room on the mountain at least indicates not a lot of people are staying overnight, which gives us some peace when the day trippers are gone.
There are plenty of sites to monitor train ticket availability, schedule, and ticket prices, but those same sites also charge a pretty hefty premium to use them to purchase tickets. We were about to use the more popular China train ticket site when our $42-$45 train ticket ended up being $60 after all fees per ticket. With 6 tickets (round trip), that's a total of $90 - $108 extra in fees. Seriously, the travel industry really takes advantage when they can. Luckily we ended up asking distant family living in China to purchase our train tickets from the site www.12306.cn, it's the official China rail site, but you need a Chinese credit card to be able to purchase, foreign credit cards are not accepted.
Before we went the route of having someone in China purchase tickets for us, I did notice the Chinese travel site, Ctrip now allows for train tickets to be purchased through them. They had that option removed in the past, but for the time being it works again. Their fee of 20 RMB (roughly $3 USD) is much more reasonable.
We thought traveling after the Golden Week there would be less tourist heading to Yellow Mountain, but surprisingly tickets for the soft sleepers were almost sold out. Not looking forward to the crowds, but the fact that we were able to get a great deal on our hotel room on the mountain at least indicates not a lot of people are staying overnight, which gives us some peace when the day trippers are gone.
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