Hajj Ticket War Part 1: Assumptions and Stage Rules
There’s a proposal from the government to run hajj registration as a “ticket war”, where whoever pays first gets the seat, like a concert ticket sale. It’s still only a proposal though.
I’m starting a series on it, and it isn’t about whether that’s a good idea. It’s about the system design. If Indonesia did go this way, what would the registration system have to look like?
I’ll keep facts and assumptions apart. The facts are how the current system works, plus a few numbers. The assumptions are design decisions I’m making.
The series stops when registration closes. Everything after that is out of scope. It is something for the government to take care of.
How payment works now
Regular hajj payment happens in two stages. Stage 1 goes to people whose queue number falls inside the quota, people who already paid in full but deferred their trip to a later year (we call it lunas tunda in Indonesian), and the elderly. Stage 2 only opens if a province still has seats left.
Quota and queue numbers are allocated per province, so someone in West Java isn’t competing with someone in Gorontalo.
In the 2026 season, stage 1 absorbed about 74% of the quota. That’s only one season, so I’m not treating it as a pattern.
Assumptions
The current registration, the one with a Rp 25 million initial deposit, has a queue of about 5.8 million people, and in 2026 there were about 203k regular seats. That works out to an average wait of roughly 28 years, and every new registration makes it longer. So if we go with the ticket war, the current registration has to stop.
People already in the queue keep their queue number and scheduled year, since seats are handed out based on those. Nobody new joins that queue.
Money from existing registrants is not refunded. The reason is the returns earned on every waiting pilgrim’s deposit. For 2027 they cover about 44% of the hajj cost, around Rp 43.8 million of Rp 98.5 million per pilgrim. Refunding deposits en masse would remove what funds the people who are about to depart.
My own view is that the ideal would be to refund everyone except those departing within 7 years. If the remaining wait is as short as 7 years, they’ve already waited long enough, and it wouldn’t be fair to make them compete in the war now. I doubt that’s workable. Nothing like a mass refund has ever happened, so this is opinion and I have nothing to back it up.
Rules per stage
Seats aren’t sold all at once. They go out in stages, numbered 0 to 4, and the last one is the war for new registrants. From here on, “stage” means these stages, not the two in the current system above. Each season has a quota per province, and seats can’t move between provinces. The stages fill in order, and a later stage only opens if the earlier ones leave seats. Every stage has a payment window, and the lengths below are example numbers.
Stage 0 is for people who paid in full and then deferred. Since they’ve paid, they take next year’s quota first and don’t join the war. If the quota is 1000 and 20 people are in this stage, 980 seats are left for everyone else in the next stage.
Stage 1 is for people scheduled to depart this season, plus the elderly The elderly means 65 and older, oldest first, capped at 5% of the quota. If the elderly don’t use their whole share, their unused seats go to the people scheduled this season.
Nobody re-registers in stage 1. They just pay the remainder within 14 days. If stage 1 fills the quota, it ends there.
Stage 2 is for people scheduled within the next 6 years after this season (6 is just an example), and it only opens if stage 1 leaves seats. The payment window is 18 days. Priority goes by queue number.
Anyone who failed to pay in stage 1 rolls in at the front, because their numbers are the smallest. For example, if 280 seats are left after stage 1, they go to the next 280 people by queue number, starting with those who missed stage 1.
Stage 3 is for everyone scheduled more than 6 years out, and it only opens if stage 2 comes up short. The payment window is 7 days, and it’s first pay, first served. That makes it a war too, just between people who are already registered.
Stage 4 is the war for new registrants. It’s for people who never registered, and it only opens if stage 3 leaves seats. They have to pay in full right away, and the payment window is 14 days.
Note: the 6-year window is relative to the current season, not fixed calendar years, so it slides every season. Someone scheduled 8 years out this season is 7 years out the next, and eventually lands inside stage 2, where queue number decides instead of speed.
Why the rules differ per stage
What differs is how a seat gets decided. Stages 1 and 2 are protected: stage 1 follows the schedule (and age for the elderly), and stage 2 follows queue number. Stages 3 and 4 are first pay, first served, so speed decides.
Stage 2 protects people whose departure is close. If someone is scheduled in two or three years, getting overtaken costs them a lot, so queue number decides.
Stage 3 is first pay first served because those people are far from departure. Being overtaken by someone who registered later barely costs them. And anyone who keeps losing eventually moves into stage 2, and then stage 1, where there’s no war.
Seats held in pairs
A few seats get special handling. Companions of the elderly, disabled pilgrims, and pilgrims who must travel with a close relative are held in one reservation for two seats, since they travel together.
New registrants wait
There’s deliberately no fixed share of the quota for new registrants. If there were, they’d take seats from people who registered earlier, and I don’t think that’s fair.
So new registrants effectively wait. While the old queue still exists, the real war happens in stage 3, among people who are already registered. Stage 4 only gets seats if the old queue is used up, or if stage 3 leaves some seats unpaid.
