Taipei, July 3 (CNA) Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp. (THSRC) is now allowing passengers to purchase a single one-way ticket for a non-reserved seat for travel the same day through its T Express app, effective immediately, the company said in a press release Monday.
Prior to this new feature, passengers were limited to booking and purchasing non-reserved seats at ticket windows or through ticket machines at high-speed rail stations and could not do so online or through the app.
There are restrictions, however. Though the app can generally be accessed anywhere, the non-reserved-seat function will only be available at high-speed rail stations or their immediate vicinities, the THSRC statement said.
Also, each passenger can only buy one one-way ticket at a time using the app, the company said. If people want to buy more than one ticket or round-trip tickets, they still have to resort to traditional methods.
To use the service, passengers should head to a high-speed rail station with their smartphone, connect to Bluetooth, open the T Express app, hit the "non-reserved" section at the top of the screen, select the departure and arrival stations, and make the payment.
They will then get a QR code on the app that can be used to get through the ticket gate of the departure station, the statement said.
To be able to use the function, the app has to be updated to its 6.60 version.
The tickets for non-reserved seats, as the THSRC website noted, are valid for all trains and non-reserved seats, but are no longer valid after the specific date they were to be used for has passed.
The company recommended potential users to use the smartphone app as close to ticket counters, machines and gates as possible to have the best internet connections to the non-reserved seat booking feature.
Passengers can use the app to book seats from the opening hour of each station to five minutes prior to the last train's departure.
For special holiday trains that run past midnight, the booking time's deadline will be 11:59 p.m.
Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp. introduced non-reserved seats in November 2007 and opened purchases of such tickets through stored value cards such as the Easy Card and iPass in December 2011.
They are usually used by people who are traveling at the last minute.
