Henan's Multi-Ride Rail Ticket: 2–10 Legs on One 12306 Pass
The pass people mean when they say “multi-ride ticket”
China Railway runs two different families of multi-ride product, and almost every confused question about them comes from mixing the two up.
The first family is the commuter one. It is sold as 10, 20 or 60 rides on a fixed pair of stations, it is aimed at people who take the same train to work, and it does not care which departure you take. The second family is the tourist pass, and it lives in a different tab. In the 12306 app it sits under 计次·定期票, then 旅游. If you are reading this because you want to move around Henan for a week, you want the second one.
The tourist pass works on a simple model: one purchase, several legs, a fixed window to use them. You choose between two and ten legs inside a set list of stations, each leg is a single one-way ride in a seat class you pick at purchase, and if you choose exactly two legs they cannot be a round trip on the same pair of stations. The whole thing follows two clocks, which is the part worth understanding before you pay.
The two passes that touch Henan
Two tourist passes cross this province, and they are not variations on each other. They cover different geography at different prices.
The narrow one is 郑汴洛·唐宋风华穿越之旅, which translates roughly as the Zhengzhou-Kaifeng-Luoyang Tang and Song route. Six stations: Zhengzhou, Zhengzhou East, Luoyang Longmen, Kaifeng, Kaifeng North and Songcheng Road. It starts at ¥40.
The wide one is 华夏古都·文化传承之旅, the Huaxia Ancient Capitals route. Seven stations: Beijing West, Beijing Fengtai, Zhengzhou, Zhengzhou East, Luoyang Longmen, Xi’an and Xi’an North. It starts at ¥115.
Notice what both lists have in common. Zhengzhou East and Luoyang Longmen are the two stations that matter for a Henan trip, because Zhengzhou East is where the north-south and east-west high-speed lines cross, and Luoyang Longmen is the station for the grottoes. Kaifeng North puts you 20 minutes from the Song capital, and Songcheng Road is the small station on the older Zhengzhou-Kaifeng intercity line, handy if you are staying near the Kaifeng old town rather than out by the high-speed station.
Notice too that the two Luoyang stations are not interchangeable, and only one of them is on the pass. Luoyang Longmen is the high-speed station in the south of the city, which is the one you want for the grottoes. The older Luoyang station in the west of the city handles the slow trains. If you are still working out which one your ticket means, the station comparison settles it, and getting it wrong costs you an hour.
Now notice what is missing. Anyang. Neither pass includes it, so Yin Xu and the oracle bones have to be bought as ordinary tickets, and that is the single most useful thing to know before you plan a four-capital route. Our four capitals by rail route runs into this wall in the middle, which is why the Anyang leg there is priced separately.
How the price is built
The pass is not a flat fare and it is not a railcard. It is a bundle priced from your own itinerary, with a discount applied.
The rule China Railway publishes is that the discounted price per leg sits at or below 85 percent of the average executed fare for that route in that seat class. In plain terms: at least 15 percent off, sometimes more, depending on which legs and which trains you pick. That is why the headline numbers start low and climb. Two legs of Zhengzhou-Kaifeng is the cheapest thing the product can produce, which is where the ¥40 comes from. Ten legs spanning Beijing, Zhengzhou, Luoyang and Xi’an is a different order of money entirely.
So the honest comparison is not “pass versus single ticket” in the abstract. It is “this specific bundle versus the same legs bought one at a time”, and the app will show you both if you price the legs first and then look at the pass. Do that arithmetic before you buy, because on a short trip the saving can be small enough that the constraints are not worth it.
The discount holds for children too. Since June 2026 children aged 6 to 14 can hold their own tourist pass at half the adult price, stacked on top of the existing discount, provided an adult travels with them.
Two ways to ride, and one way to lose a leg
Once you hold the pass, each leg works like a normal high-speed journey with a slightly unusual booking path.
The first method is to reserve. In the 12306 app or website you pick the leg, pick a departure and hold a seat. You can also reserve at a ticket machine with the original document you bought with, though as we will get to, that route is closed to most international travelers. A reservation cancelled before departure costs nothing.
The second method is to walk up. Tourist passes are built for the case where you do not want to commit to a train time: if the route has seats left, you swipe the same document at the gate, the system assigns you a seat, and the details appear in the app or by text message. Outside the big travel peaks this genuinely works and it is the best feature of the product. Over Golden Week or the Spring Festival rush, treat it as unavailable and reserve instead, and read our Golden Week survival notes before you test that.
The mistake that costs money is booking a seat, changing your mind, and not cancelling. An uncancelled reservation is counted as a ridden leg whether you boarded or not. Two taps in the app, done the night before, and the leg stays in your pocket.
The 30-day clock and the 15-day window
Two deadlines govern the pass, and they run in sequence rather than together.
Purchase starts the first clock. You have 30 days, counting the day you buy, to activate the pass. Activation is automatic and undramatic: it happens the moment any leg is either successfully reserved or ridden. If nothing happens in those 30 days, the order voids itself and the full amount returns to your original payment method. There is no penalty and no phone call needed.
Activation starts the second clock. From that moment the legs you chose are valid for 15 days. That is a generous window for a province this size. A realistic Henan loop of Zhengzhou, Kaifeng, Luoyang and a day trip or two fits inside it with room to spare, which is the scenario the product was designed around.
What the clocks mean in practice: buy the pass when your dates are firm, not months early, and do not activate it by reserving a seat you might not use just to “start the clock” on a day that suits you.
What the pass will not do
Four limits are worth knowing before you commit.
It will not get you to Anyang, as covered above, and it will not get you to the Shaolin Temple side of Dengfeng either, since Dengfeng has no station on either list. Both are ordinary-ticket journeys, and both are worth doing anyway, which is the argument in our notes on the Chinese cities most travellers skip.
It will not create seats. A pass is a payment method, not a reservation. If the trains between Zhengzhou and Luoyang are full on a Friday evening, holding a pass changes nothing.
It cannot be shared. The pass is real-name and tied to one person’s document, and it is explicitly non-transferable. Two travelers need two passes. The seat class is fixed at purchase as well, so there is no upgrading one leg to first class on a whim.
And it is not the commuter product, whatever the man at the ticket window calls it. The commuter passes are cheaper per ride on some routes and completely useless for a sightseeing loop, because they lock you to one station pair.
If you are travelling on a non-Chinese passport
Here is the honest state of things, because this is the question that decides whether the whole idea is usable.
There is no official statement either way on whether the tourist passes are open to non-Chinese passports. The product is real-name, the document used to buy it is the document presented at the gate, and 12306 does support passport registration and passport ticket purchases once identity verification is done, which you can complete by uploading your passport photo page or at a station window. Whether the tourist pass specifically appears in a passport-linked account is something I could not confirm from any official source.
Two practical consequences follow. First, self-service ticket machines in China do not accept foreign passports, only the permanent residence ID, so every part of this has to be done in the app or at a staffed window. Second, and more important, check it yourself before you build a plan. Open the 12306 app on your own account, go to 计次·定期票 then 旅游, and see whether the Henan products are offered to you. If they are not, the fallback is unglamorous and completely fine: single tickets on these routes are cheap, they go on sale about two weeks out, and the legs are short enough that committing to a departure time costs you very little.
When the pass is worth it, and when it is not
Buy it if your trip is a Henan loop with at least three intercity legs, if you value turning up and taking the next train over locking in a departure time, and if you are travelling outside the national holiday peaks.
Skip it if you are doing one or two hops, if Anyang is the point of the trip, if you are moving during the first week of May or October when the walk-up option evaporates, or if your dates are still soft. In those cases the ordinary booking flow on China’s high-speed rail network does everything you need, and the penalty for changing your mind is one refund fee rather than a leg of a bundle.
There is also a middle path that suits most first trips: buy single tickets for the long legs you are sure about, and keep the pass idea for a second visit, when you already know which cities you want to linger in.
Booking it, in order
The sequence that avoids every trap in this article.
Open the 12306 app or website and go to 计次·定期票, then the 旅游 section. Enter the stations you care about and see which products appear. Read the station list rather than the product name, because the names are poetic and the station lists are literal.
Choose your legs. Two to ten, one-way each, no same-pair round trip if you are only buying two. Pick the seat class at this point, because it is fixed afterwards.
Pay, then let the pass sit until your dates firm up. You have 30 days.
On the road, reserve each leg the night before, or walk up and swipe if the timetable is loose and the trains are not full. Cancel anything you drop, before departure, every time.
And if your route touches Yin Xu, buy that leg separately from the start. There is no combination of these two passes that covers it. If cost is the thing you are weighing, our per-city cost breakdown puts the transport numbers next to hotels and food, which is where the comparison actually belongs.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Henan’s tourist rail pass cost?
The Zhengzhou-Kaifeng-Luoyang pass starts at ¥40 and the wider Huaxia Ancient Capitals pass starts at ¥115, but neither is a flat fare. The price is built from the legs you choose, with a floor of about 15 percent off the average fare for that route and seat class, so a two-leg booking is far cheaper than a ten-leg one. The app shows your exact total before you pay.
Does the multi-ride pass cover Anyang and Yin Xu?
No. The Zhengzhou-Kaifeng-Luoyang pass lists six stations and the Huaxia Ancient Capitals pass lists seven, and Anyang is not on either list. Anyang has to be bought as an ordinary ticket, which means the four ancient capitals cannot be done on a single pass.
Do I still have to book a seat with a multi-ride pass?
Yes, in practice. You can reserve a seat for each leg through the 12306 app or website, or swipe your ID at the gate and take an automatically assigned seat if the train still has space. A reservation you cancel before departure costs nothing. A reservation you simply do not use counts as one of your legs.
What happens if I buy the pass and never use it?
You have 30 days from the purchase date to activate it, and activation happens the moment any leg is reserved or ridden. If 30 days pass with no activity the order voids itself and the money goes back to your original payment method in full. Once activated, the chosen legs are valid for 15 days.
Can I buy a Chinese multi-ride rail pass with a foreign passport?
There is no published rule either way. The passes are real-name and tied to the document used to buy them, and 12306 does allow passport registration and passport ticket purchases after identity verification. Self-service machines do not accept foreign passports, so anything you book has to be booked in the app. Check that the product appears in your own account before you build a plan around it.
Is the ¥155 four-leg pass still sold?
No. That version was launched in August 2024 for four fixed legs over nine days, and it is what older guides still quote. The current tourist passes run from two to ten legs, stay valid for 15 days after activation and must be activated within 30 days of purchase.
