Railway ticket reservation period extended to 2 months due to 68% increase in foreign passengers

Expansion of multilingual services as foreign passengers surge by 68%

(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Kim Yun-gu = Starting next month, you will be able to reserve KTX and other railway tickets two months before departure.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the Korea Railroad Corporation announced on the 20th that they will expand the railway ticket reservation period from 1 month before departure to 2 months from October 1 to increase the convenience of using the railway.

This measure is intended to allow domestic and foreign tourists to purchase railway tickets in advance when making travel plans.

Foreign tourists often purchase airline tickets two months in advance, but railway tickets can be reserved up to a month in advance, making it inconvenient to plan domestic travel.

It is expected that Koreans will also be able to secure tickets comfortably when planning long-distance travel during the vacation season or peak season.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport is also improving related services as the use of railways by foreign tourists has recently increased rapidly. The number of foreign rail users from January to August this year was 6.69 million, a 68% increase from the same period last year.

The webpage for foreigners, which currently supports seven languages, including English, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese, plans to add French, German, and Mongolian to increase the number of supported languages ​​to 10 by the end of the year.

In addition, we are developing a system so that tickets can be purchased using Chinese simple payment services WeChat Pay and Alipay, in addition to overseas credit cards such as Visa, Master, and Union Pay.