"Stricter Penalty Standards Increase Weekend KTX Seat Availability"

After the penalty criteria were strengthened, the number of KTX seats available on weekends increased.

According to Korea Railroad Corporation (KORAIL) on October 1, the average number of weekend seats resold after cancellation increased by 3,254 per day following the implementation of stricter refund penalty criteria for weekend tickets in May. This is equivalent to operating 3.4 additional KTX trains (with 955 seats each).

With the stricter penalty criteria, the early refund fee for tickets canceled two days before departure rose by 5.4 percentage points, from 44.9% to 50.3%. The proportion of "no-shows"-tickets refunded but not resold-also dropped by 0.5 percentage points, from 4.1% to 3.6%. This indicates improved efficiency in seat management.

Photo by Yonhap News Agency

Recently, KORAIL has also strengthened measures to prevent unfair ticket preemption and illegal ticket trading using digital technologies such as macros.

For example, the "macro detection solution" introduced in July has effectively blocked an average of 16,000 macro attacks per day. Macros are illegal programs that automate repetitive tasks and have been identified as a major cause of limiting legitimate train ticket reservations for users.

Using the macro detection solution, KORAIL analyzes user access patterns and purchasing behaviors in real time. If a user is suspected of using macros, access is blocked from the login and ticket inquiry stages.

Ticket "bulk purchase cancellation monitoring" using big data analytics also plays a key role. Introduced in February, this method analyzes all real-time reservation and cancellation records to identify habitual cases of purchasing and then canceling large numbers of tickets.

Furthermore, the credit cards of identified users are restricted from ticket payments for one year, effectively preventing bulk purchases and cancellations for fraudulent purposes.

As a result of these measures, the average daily number of bulk purchase cancellations, which was 75 in March, gradually decreased to 0.8 per day last month. There have been no cases of cancellations involving purchases of over 5 million won since August.

Lee Minseong, Head of Customer Marketing at KORAIL, stated, "We will do our best to foster a fair and proper rail travel culture through digital transformation efforts and policy improvements, such as big data analysis and macro-blocking technologies." He added, "Additionally, starting this month, the additional fare for passengers without tickets will be raised to 100% of the base fare (from the previous 50%), further strengthening the crackdown on fare evasion."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.