The Most Inconvenient Online Travel Company in the World

Now that our semester has wound down in Beijing, Jessica and I have some time to travel around China before we go back to the US. We had planned to spend a couple of days in Beijing with our friends before taking the overnight train to Xi'an, then the overnight train to Chengdu, then flying to Guilin and then flying back to Beijing. Unfortunately, this weekend is "Worker's Holiday", so EVERYONE in China (all 1.4 billion of them) is trying to take the train to go back to their country village and the train station is a complete nut house. I went by last night to purchase tickets and there were mobs of people running around, waiting, squatting and sleeping outside. Since there are a lot of real peasanty types taking the train, everyone cuts in line and you have to be really aggressive. Several people asked me to help them purchase tickets to get home, I said no thanks. I noticed that they pestered other local Chinese too, not just me, so I guess I don't mind as much. I would have been more annoyed had they targeted the only foreigner in the train station.

There were only soft sleeper tickets available on Monday night to go to Xi'an, so I elected not to purchase. We are checking out of our hotel on Sunday so we didn't want to extend for another day--we've been in Beijing for 7 weeks and wanted to get out of town! Jessica was back in the hotel and is out of minutes on her phone (Again! She and her boyfriend talk so much she goes through a 100RMB card every two days. Yes. Two days!) so I couldn't call her to confirm. Soft sleeper from Beijing to Xi'an is about 420RMB.

I went back to the hotel and suggested to Jessica that we go the opposite way, and fly straight from Beijing to Guilin. I looked up the tickets using an online reservation site, www.elong.net. They have searchable functions in English and allow you to book online (some Chinese websites don't, you have to come and pay for the tickets in person). We had looked at flights earlier in the week and they were a little pricey, about 1000RMB for the flight from Guilin to Beijing. As it turned out, the flights were now half the price! Beijing to Guilin was only 540RMB and Guilin to Chengdu (to see the pandas) was only 510RMB! What a deal! We booked the tickets immediately, planning to buy the train tickets when we get to Chengdu.

Elong has quite possibly one of the worst systems for buying tickets online: you input your credit card and hit confirm, but then you have to scan or fax a signed credit card use authorization form AND copies of front and back of your credit card AND a copy of your passport (if you are a foreign credit card holder). What a pain! Jess and I spent about 2 hours taking photos of our passports and credit cards and emailing them, and elong kept calling us back saying stuff like "your electronic authorization is not good enough, we need fax" and "we cannot see the signature on the back of Miss Tartell's credit card". We finally solved the problems by sending out electronic authorizations to Jessica's boyfriend in the US, and having him e-fax the authorizations back to elong. They were insistent that they needed either a scanned copy or a fax--which was ridiculous because it's the SAME goddamn thing. Anyway, right about midnight we got everything sorted out, which was annoying because Panos and Ben came over to our hotel room to have a drink before we went out. We had planned to go to Fez Bar, which is this cool outdoor bar overlooking the city, but it closes at 1pm so we couldn't go at midnight. Instead, I had a better idea...