Shanghai-Beijing railway to adopt floating price system

The high-speed railway between Shanghai and Beijing will adopt a floating ticket price system, Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Railway Co Ltd announced on Friday.

The new price system will begin on Dec 23 and be adopted only for trains with a speed between 300 and 350 kilometers per hour running between Beijing and Shanghai, the company revealed, explaining the float is the result of imbalanced demand and supply for passengers between the two cities.

Under the system, the ticket price for a second-class seat will be between 598 and 498 yuan. For a business class seat, the price will be between 1,998 and 1,748 yuan.

Currently, the ticket price for a second-class seat is 553 yuan, and 1,748 yuan for a business class seat.

The company said it will adjust the price in accordance with passenger flow volume.

The Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway, which was open to traffic in 2011, handled 215 million passengers last year — an increase of 10.1 percent year-on-year, accounting for 6 percent of the total number of passengers carried by the country's railway. It takes about four and a half hours for the fastest bullet train to travel between the two cities.

In 2019, Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Railway Co Ltd gained revenue of 32.94 billion yuan, an increase of 5.72 percent over the previous year, and its net profit attributable to shareholders registered a year-on-year increase of 16.48 percent to 11.94 billion yuan, according to its annual report released in April.