12306 Chief Engineer responds to the difficulty of getting a ticket during the Spring Festival travel rush.

This year's Spring Festival travel rush begins on February 2, and the corresponding ticket sales for the Spring Festival travel rush start on January 19. It is expected that the core ticket rush period before the festival will be from January 30 to February 1, and the core ticket rush period after the festival will be from February 8 to February 9. The accumulated over ten million standby orders reflect the current intense queue pressure for purchasing tickets during the Spring Festival travel rush, with over ten million people facing the situation of "tickets are hard to get". However, "tickets are hard to get" does not mean that tickets cannot be purchased. Duan Xingying, the chief engineer of the Railway 12306 Technology Center, stated that this year the average success rate of standby ticket purchases on 12306 is expected to be over 70%, and most passengers who purchase standby tickets can ultimately get tickets to go home. "After the tickets are sold out, if there are really no more tickets available, you can submit your standby request, pay for it, and this demand will be placed in the standby queue. When tickets are returned due to refunds or changes, or when additional trains are added, they will be allocated in the order in which they were submitted," Duan Xingying explained. Some third-party online ticketing platforms claim that they can book tickets 90 or 30 days in advance, in contrast to the 15-day advance booking period required by 12306. In reality, all platforms must comply with the railway's uniform rule of a 15-day advance booking period, and extending the booking period is just a marketing gimmick for some businesses.