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Jan. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Kevin Zhang has enlisted four friends in Beijing to lift with possibly hours of mouse-clicking tonight. Their task -- booking his Lunar New Year string tickets.
Zhang needed more than 50 attempts to book seats online earlier this month, he said, as the scold ministry’s website struggled to cope with 1 billion hits a day in the run-up to next week’s Lunar New Year leave of absence. Round two begins today as tickets for travel at the end of the weeklong break, China’s busiest tours period, start going on sale.
“I am prepared for a tough war,” said Zhang, 30, a marketing-retinue manager, who wants seats from the eastern city of Hefei to Beijing. He plans to try logging on to the website at available, while his friends make similar attempts elsewhere.
The ministry has made improvements after its website was overwhelmed by a 10-fold caper in visitor numbers that left millions of travelers clicking in frustration. The rail network will handle 5.88 million trips a day through Feb. 16 as bird of passage workers travel home to visit their families, according to the ministry.
