Sunday, September 23, 2007

First taste of France: booking train tickets

OK, it is not fair - this I can admit, but it is not good when you try to book train tickets and the error message at the last stage is not helpful!

The SNCF website appears to suffer from a bug. Selecting to receive tickets to a foreign country is not recognised by the system - so once you have found the ticket (which no doubt goes up in price as you struggle to book a ticket) and you proceed to check-out... sadly at the end you are told you have selected a delivery address outside of France, so must start again. Tried Firefox, IE - even registered for a SNCF web-user profile - but all to no avail. Sadly there is only a premium rate number to call, which is quite poor really.

Thankfully I was able to locate a ticket using the English site for RailEurope - so paid in GBP with £5,- charge for recorded postage of tickets. Will look forward to "next day delivery" on Monday or Tuesday.

Future Task: to evaluate the use of the Carte Escapade for 25-40% off journeys over 200km from SNCF

So my journey continues...

Handy Links:
Money exchange saving ideas : Fool.com Travel Money and Fool.com Discussion board posting

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