Palace Museum expands online ticket purchasing service

The Palace Museum in Beijing announced on Tuesday that after a series of tests it has expanded its online ticket purchasing service to include the mobile Internet.

In addition to being able to reserve tickets ahead of time on the Palace Museum’s official website, visitors who arrive at the museum will also be able to purchase tickets online by scanning a QR code with their mobile phones.

Tickets cost 40 yuan ($6) during off season (November 1 – March 31) and 60 yuan the rest of the year.

Additionally, a special service window has been established to help tourists who either don’t have a phone, are unable to access online payment methods or are unfamiliar with scanning QR codes.

To reduce the long wait times involved in standing in line for tickets and to control crowd flow, the Palace Museum began offering online ticket purchases on September 25, 2011.

It also began limiting the number of tickets sold each day to 80,000 starting on June 13, 2015.

While only 1.68 percent of tickets were booked online in 2011, this number rose to 17.33 percent in 2015, and 41.14 percent in 2016.

After the museum began testing the QR code system on July 1, online ticket purchases accounted for 77 percent of sales by August.

As reported by the Beijing Youth Daily, Shan Jixiang, the curator of the Palace Museum, noted that by providing information about the number of remaining tickets each day online, this has encouraged more visitors to head to the museum during the off season, thus spreading out visitor traffick.