Holiday train tickets in low demand

Train ticket demand for the upcoming Lunar New Year Holiday is plunging due to fear of Covid-19 contagion as thousands of new cases nationwide are confirmed each day.

Saigon Railway Station in HCMC opened its ticket sales for Tet 2022, the biggest annual holiday which falls in early February, but its nine counters were seen with few inquirers.

Viet Truong, 37, showed up at 7 a.m., anticipating a large number of customers as what happened in previous years.

“I got the tickets in only 20 minutes, while in previous years I had to wait the whole morning.”

Tet tickets are being sold for five routes: four North-South routes and one HCMC-Da Nang route, while in previous years there were 20 routes.

After two hours of opening sales, over 1,500 tickets were sold, which is the lowest in recent years.

Hundreds of seats were still available as of lunchtime, even though tickets are being sold at a 10-15 percent discount in the first 10 days.

Vietnam recorded over 8,200 new Covid-19 cases on average in each of the last seven days, with over 1,200 in HCMC alone.