Alipay is available for coach tickets

Coach tickets may be purchased through Alipay, China's leading third-party online payment platform in 98 Chinese cities in 2016, including the city of Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province, Alipay said on Jan 18.

With the new purchasing approach, passengers can use the mobile Alipay app to scan the QR code of a coach station to buy coach tickets, and also pay for the tickets through Alipay.

Passengers who buy a coach ticket worth at least 20 yuan ($3.04) can enjoy a random price reduction to a maximum of 10 yuan and have access to a lucky draw, according to Alitrip, an online travel service platform of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group.

The Alipay service for coach tickets is expected to cut the queue time for passengers and improve the work efficiency of coach stations.

However, Alipay has not been widely accepted by passengers in Gansu, because some elderly passengers don’t know how to use Alipay, and others are dubious about account security.

A passenger surnamed Wang said that he doesn't know how to shop online. "My children always help me buy train tickets online and I can introduce online coach purchases to my children," said Wang.

To ensure account security, Alipay has introduced insurance costing one yuan, with a maximum of one million yuan of compensation.

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According to Alipay, Gansu's mobile payment accounted for 79.4 percent of its total online payment transactions in 2015, ranking it third among all the provinces and autonomous regions, after only the Tibet autonomous region and Guizhou province.

Edited by Peter Nordlinger