Beijing Market Regulation Department Interviews 12 Third-Party Train Ticket Online Sales Platforms

Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, February 12 (Reporter Liu Yang) — The Beijing Municipal Market Supervision Administration announced on February 12 that it recently organized an administrative meeting with 12 major platforms involved in online train ticket sales, including Ctrip, Qunar, Fliggy, Tongcheng, Meituan, JD.com, TravelSky, High-Speed Rail Housekeeper, Didi, Amap, Baidu Maps, and Tencent Maps. The focus was on addressing prominent issues related to online train ticket sales that have been strongly reflected by the public.

At the meeting, the Beijing Municipal Market Supervision Administration clearly outlined four compliance requirements for all platforms:

1. Strictly implement main responsibility and social responsibility, establish correct business concepts, and help travelers travel more smoothly and with less hassle;
2. Conduct a comprehensive review of business models and service processes, prohibit explicit or implicit promises that consumers can gain priority ticket purchasing privileges through paid services, promptly rectify misleading promotions such as “speed-up packages,” “dual channels,” and “remaining ticket monitoring” after tickets are sold out, and consciously accept social supervision;
3. Fully review and rectify platform pages, remove products with misleading promotions, adjust promotional content on pages, and prohibit the use of 12306 images, text, trademarks, etc., to prevent consumers from mistakenly believing that the platform has specific business cooperation with 12306;
4. Carefully implement clear pricing, prominently remind users of value-added services and their prices, promptly rectify issues where ticket prices displayed do not match actual payment amounts due to insufficient prominence of value-added service prompts, and effectively protect consumers’ right to be informed.

It is understood that the Beijing Municipal Market Supervision Administration will continue to strengthen regulatory enforcement, strictly crack down on illegal activities such as fake ticket抢购, inducement to transactions, and price fraud. Meanwhile, the public is encouraged to strengthen supervision of third-party online train ticket sales platforms, jointly promote industry规范 and healthy development, and maintain a fair competitive market order.

(Edited by: Wen Jing)