Thousands of people took a day off from work on December 1 to buy train tickets through text messages for the lunar New Year 2010, which will fall in early February.

Though the Saigon Railway Station began selling the tickets by SMS at 8:30am, hundreds had arrived at the station by 5am all set to send the messages.

By 9am, the station was packed with people surrounding notice boards to read the directions and send messages. The occasional happy scream could be heard from those getting replies.

Pham Thi Thanh Minh, a garment worker from Hoc Mon District, said she took a day off work to leave for the station by 6am.

Since 8:30am, she said she had sent 31 messages and got just five replies, each saying “your message is handled by the system. Please wait for the reply or call 1900561258 for more information.”

Nguyen Viet Dung, a worker from District 12, said angrily he had left for the station at 2am and sent 15 messages without getting a reply.

“When I came to the station gate, brokers asked me for VND100,000 to 200,000 on top of ticket prices,” he said.

Some people who received confirmation through SMS said despite waiting five hours they failed to buy the tickets.

Many people were angry when they called to the hot line 1900561258 but nobody answered.

Some said that they received the message saying that all 3000 tickets for December 1 were sold out despite starting to send messages very early.

Meanwhile, Saigon Railway Station’s statistics show that by the end of December 1, it received 47,600 SMS but up to 22,749 messages were considered to be wrong. The system processed only 1,000 messages. Each message booked 3-4 tickets on average. Around 23,000 correct SMS were processed in the next day.

The station’s chief Nguyen Thi Thanh Phuong said that the SMS system was overloaded because of the huge number of messages coming at the same time. She admitted that only 1,000 messages processed was modest in comparison to the station’s target of selling 3000 tickets per day via SMS.

She explained that if passengers send messages incorrectly then their messages will fail. Phuong also corrected that the SMS system’s feedback saying that 3000 tickets were sold out was wrong because the number of tickets prepared for December 1 still left 2000 unsold.

The station’s chief said both the station and passengers were confused with the new service. However, she confirmed that all sent messages would be answered.

She recommended passengers not send too many SMS at the same time otherwise the SMS system may jam.

She also told passengers to carefully check their message content because with a small error in information, the message is considered as failure.

VietNamNet/VNE