Passenger choice behaviour of buying tickets has a great impact on the high-speed rail (HSR) revenue management. It is very critical to find out the sensitive factors that prevent passengers with high willingness to pay for a ticket from buying low-price tickets. The literature on passenger choice behaviour mainly focuses on travel mode choice, choice between a conventional train and a high-speed train and choice among high-speed trains. To extend the literature and serve revenue management, this paper investigates passenger choice behaviour of buying high-speed railway tickets. The data were collected by the stated preference (SP) survey based on Beijing-Hohhot high-speed railway. The conditional logit model was established to analyse influencing factors for business travel and non-business travel. The results show that: business passengers have the higher inherent preference for full-price tickets, while non-business passengers have the higher inherent preference for discount tickets; the number of days booked in advance and frequent passenger points have a significant impact on the ticket choice of business travellers, but not on non-business travellers; passengers are unwilling to buy tickets that depart after 16:00 for non-business travel; factors have different effects on the passengers' choice in business travel and non-business travel. The results can provide parameters for revenue management models and references for the ticket-product design.