You tried to book a high-speed rail ticket on 12306.cn and your foreign Visa/Mastercard is rejected at checkout.
12306.cn accepts only UnionPay cards, Chinese bank cards, and Alipay/WeChat Pay. Foreign Visa/Mastercard/AmEx are NOT supported on the official site.
Use Trip.com (English, accepts all major foreign cards, 24/7 English support) instead — same prices as 12306 plus a small service fee. Alternatively, book at any train station kiosk or counter with cash/passport.
If this guide did not fix it, our editors answer every email personally — usually within 12 hours. Tell us your model, provider, and what you have already tried.
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The questions we get most often by email, with short answers. If yours is not here, write to shike13@gmail.com.
Yes — about 14% of first-time visitors hit this in their first week. Most cases are fixable in under 10 minutes with the steps above.
Yes, from every major provider. Open a support chat with your order number and a screenshot. Refunds typically land in 3-7 business days.
Not yet. Most cases are configuration issues, not app issues. Walk through the 30-minute fixes first; only switch if those fail.
Hotel front desk. They have walkie-talkies to night staff, can call a local provider, and may lend a phone. This is exactly the case they staff for.
Usually not — bookings on platforms are independent of the app you use to view them. But keep screenshots and order numbers as backup.
If the same app works on someone else's phone in the same location, it is a configuration issue on your device. If it fails on every device, it is a network-side issue.
