The consuming public is not a lamb to be slaughtered; high-speed rail ticket refunds cannot be subject to arbitrary clauses.
[4] Compiled from: Red Star News
Case review
As one of the main modes of transportation for business travel, the issue of ticket refund fees for high-speed rail has long attracted widespread attention. The current railway refund fee adopts a tiered plan: no refund fee is charged for cancellations made more than 15 days before departure; for cancellations within 15 days (inclusive), fees apply: 5% for cancellations more than 48 hours before departure, 20% for cancellations less than 24 hours before departure, and 10% for cancellations between these two timeframes. Moreover, during the Spring Festival travel season, a flat 20% refund fee is charged.
However, the standard for railway transport enterprises to charge passenger refund fees has not been subject to public hearings. In fact, at the end of 2003, the former State Planning Commission issued the "Opinions on Regulating Passenger Transport Refund Fees," which clearly stipulated that tickets that can be resold should not, in principle, be subject to refund fees. In 2008, the National Development and Reform Commission also proposed to the former Ministry of Railways to cancel refund fees. However, these two documents were never implemented. Therefore, the current 5% to 20% refund fee not only clearly does not match the actual labor cost of processing refunds but also violates relevant legal provisions and contractual agreements.
Civil Code of the People's Republic of China
Article 496
A standard-form clause is a clause that is prepared in advance by a party for repeated use and is not negotiated with the other party at the time of concluding the contract.
When a contract is concluded using standard-form clauses, the party providing the standard-form clauses shall determine the rights and obligations between the parties in accordance with the principle of fairness and shall take reasonable measures to draw the other party's attention to clauses that exempt or reduce the provider's liability or involve other significant interests of the other party, and shall explain such clauses upon the other party's request. If the party providing the standard-form clauses fails to fulfill the obligation to draw attention or provide explanation, causing the other party to fail to notice or understand clauses that significantly affect its interests, the other party may assert that such clauses are not part of the contract.
[1] The author's perspective
Whether refund fees should be charged at all first requires determining what a refund fee actually is. If it is a handling fee, then the standard and amount of the refund fee are clearly far higher than the cost. The true meaning of the refund fee may actually be a penalty for breach of contract under civil law. In reality, the refund fee is not the result of negotiation between the passenger and China Railway at the time of contracting, but rather a penalty fee set by China Railway as the carrier in the form of standard terms. If it significantly exceeds the actual losses, the counterparty has the right to request a reduction of the penalty fee. If a passenger cancels a ticket and it is quickly resold through the waiting list, the railway enterprise suffers no loss, and the refund fee should not be charged.
Furthermore, according to the provisions of the Civil Code mentioned above, if the party providing the standard terms fails to fulfill the obligation to remind or explain, causing the other party to fail to notice or understand terms that have a significant interest to them, the other party may claim that such terms are not part of the contract. From this perspective, such refund fees may indeed be suspected of being unfair contract terms.
12306 has introduced a waiting list ticket purchase function. Should refund fees continue to be charged for tickets that do not affect resale? Is the maximum 20% refund fee too high? These issues are indeed worth discussing.
