Jung, a 25-year-old heading home to Changwon in South Gyeongsang Province for the Chuseok holiday, failed to book a KTX seat and settled for a flight costing about twice as much as the train. "I logged on at 7 a.m. when booking opened, but all I saw was a number telling me 220,000 people were in line ahead of me," Jung said. "No canceled tickets came up either, so a flight was the only option."
As more travelers fail to secure holiday train tickets ahead of Chuseok, applications and websites that book KTX and SRT tickets on customers' behalf are proliferating. Competition for seats has intensified as travel demand concentrated into a short holiday while intercity and express bus routes, the main alternative, have been cut back.
A search for "train proxy booking" on portal sites turned up a string of such services, according to reporting by The Seoul Economic Daily on the 23rd. Methods vary by operator, but most take a customer's Korail account details, book seats on their behalf and charge a fee of 1,000 to 3,000 won per ticket. Operators are drawing customers with pledges that no fee is charged if a seat cannot be secured.
Behind the spread of these services is a shrinking bus network. Intercity and express bus routes nationwide numbered 3,203 last year, down 1,381 routes, or 30.1%, from 4,584 a decade earlier, according to the Korea Intercity and Express Bus Transport Business Association.
The problem is that proxy booking may be illegal. The Railroad Business Act bars anyone other than a rail operator or an authorized ticket agent from habitually reselling tickets at a markup or brokering such sales. Linking Korail accounts and payment methods to third-party services also raises concerns about personal data leaks.
Separately, the National Office of Investigation under the Korean National Police Agency cracked down on ticket scalping using macro programs and other tools over six months starting in March this year, uncovering 126 cases and arresting 157 people. Two of them were detained. Police plan to continue the special crackdown through the 31st of next month.
