China's annual Spring Festival travel season started on Monday with tightened pandemic restrictions and desirable tickets prices to ensure smooth and convenient travel as the world's most populated country has seen a resurgence of COVID-19 cases in some cities.

The Spring Festival travel rush, known as the world's largest annual human migration, lasts 40 days from January 17 to February 25.

The rush is expected to see 1.18 billion passenger trips, a year-on-year increase of 35.6 percent, though still down 60.4 percent compared with 2019, said Zhou Min, deputy director of the Ministry of Transport's emergency control office, at a press conference.

Besides following the measures taken during the last Spring Festival travel rush, such as temperature and health code checks and reserved seats for suspected COVID-19 patients, the relevant authorities stressed dynamic train operations.

"When any epidemic occurs in a specific area, we will suspend or reduce passenger trains from or to that area to prevent the epidemic from spreading through railways," said Zhu Wenzhong, deputy director of the passenger transport department at China State Railway Group (CSRG), the national railway operator, at a press conference. 

The national railway operator also introduced pandemic prevention and control polices countrywide on 12306, a mobile application and website the national railway operator runs to sell railway tickets.

Besides, CSRG said that it has also improved policies on refunding and changing train tickets to better facilitate travel during the Spring Festival rush.

Ticket services on 12306 will be extended to 1 a.m. from the previous 11:30 p.m., except for Tuesdays. The services open to the public at 5 a.m. each day.

Ticket refund services will be available up to the time the train departs from the station. Previously, travelers were only allowed to get ticket refunds up to 25 minutes before the train departed.

To improve passengers' satisfaction, the national railway operator provides a minimum of 20 percent discount for passengers taking general speed trains, while the high-speed trains still provided a minimum of 55 percent discounts during the travel rush.  

Data from Qunaer.com, a Chinese online travel agency, showed that southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, central China's Wuhan City and northeast China's Harbin City are the top three destinations for the 2022 Spring Festival travel rush.  
Fuyang City in east China's Anhui Province is also a hot destination as the city is a main exporter of migrant workers nationwide.  

The data also showed that south China's Guangzhou City, north China's Beijing Municipality and east China's Hangzhou City are the top three departure cities. These cities also host many talents whose birthplaces are usually not the places they work.