As the Chinese New Year (aka Spring Festival) is approaching, many local citizens are planning to get home in order to spend this holiday with their families. Many of those people will have to face what is commonly known as "the largest human migration in the world". Overcrowded transportation hubs and the struggle to purchase tickets on time makes headlines all around the globe every year.

Yet a huge wave of people craving to reunite with their relatives isn't the only hardship that many Chinese will have to overcome. For some, it's hard to even afford a ticket back home. Hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers, mostly employed in factories and agriculture, often have to scrape the bottom of the barrel in order to purchase the cheapest train tickets available.

Photo by MarkoLovric

Some corporate businesses in China are starting to reach out to those stranded far away from their families. Recently, Pingan Insurance Group, the aviation data provider VariFlight and China Social Assistance Foundation along with several other enterprises initiated a joint crowdfunding campaign encouraging Chinese citizens to donate miles and benefits they had accumulated with their favorite apps to make the journey home for those in need possible. For instance, users could donate their air miles accumulated with the VariFlight app, a popular mobile application for flight tracking, and personal travel itinerary management. The benefits donated were used to transport approximately 10 000 workers across the country and let them spend their holidays with the most important people in their lives.

Several Enterprises in China helped to arrange buses for 10 000 low-paid workers. VariFlight's crowdfunding campaign (on the left) and Pingan Insurance Group (on the right)

Going by the slogan "To make your loved ones return back home" the campaign attracted contributions from several hundreds of thousands of people in a course of 6 days.

"To make your loved ones return back home": Low-paid workers are ready to go home for the 2018 Spring Festival

While many low-paid workers in China are still going to face certain difficulties with buying tickets to go back home for the Spring Festival, this initiative will serve as an example and will hopefully inspire more enterprises and local citizens to join together and help out next year.

Contributed by VariFlight