I have noticed a few US and other English-speaking posters in the last week or two mentioning that they were having more than usual difficulty booking tickets through tgv-europe.com using Great Britain as their country of origin. This has been the default recommendation for non-French speaking North Americans wanting to avoid RailEurope%26#39;s excessive prices.
I just ran a quick check on the principal booking sites for a bogus trip from Paris to Avignon using a date in early December. All three sites would allow me to print a PREMs ticket. However, if any other ticket type was selected the three sites varied. Basically it has become much more difficult to book a non-PREMs ticket in English if you do not have a mailing address in the UK. (I assume that SNCF includes Northern Ireland even though the tgv-europe site refers to Great Britain. I%26#39;m not sure that SNCF understands that the terms Great Britain and United Kingdom are not interchangeable...)
voyages-sncf.com gives you three options. (1) You can print an email confirmation and use the automatic ticket machines to pick up your ticket. As we all know this does not work for Americans. (2) You can have your tickets mailed to an address in France, again not an option for most of us on these boards. (3) You can pick up your ticket from any station or SNCF boutique using the confirmation email and the credit card used to make the booking. So nothing has changed here.
tgv-europe.com, selecting Great Britain as my home country, would ONLY allow me to receive the tickets by mail and only at an address in the UK (or Great Britain as they call it...). There wss no charge for mailing the tickets and NO other options are available.
raileurope.co.uk gave me the option of having the tickets mailed, again without charge, or picking them up at an automatic ticket machine. It does not list the option of picking them up from a station or boutique, though presumably if I were to show up at a ticket window with the confirmation number and my credit card (the same one you used to make the booking, of course) I would still get my ticket. This has always been true in the past. The prices of tickets on this site are fractionally higher than on the previous two, but not significantly — at least not for the journey I investigated.
Just to compare prices I looked at the North American site, raileurope.com. The LOWEST price ticket I found for my date was $71 with most being substantially higher. (The spread was much greater than on the SNCF site.) There is an additional charge of $12.95 for an e-ticket. If I had wanted a paper ticket I would have been charged an $18 shipping fee doubled to $36 if I wanted expedited shipping. This compares to the lowest PREMs fare for the date I chose of €22 with NO additional charges when booked on voyages-sncf.com. So for the same non-refundable ticket in the same seat on the same train RailEurope wants a minimum of $84 or approximately €58 while SNCF charges €22. The RailEurope price for a non-refundable ticket is actually about 50% higher than the price of a partially refundable/exchangeable ticket from SNCF.
The bottom line here is that the recommendation to use tgv-europe.com and select Great Britain now ONLY works if you are purchasing PREMs tickets. These are not available on all trains and/or may be sold out for your travel dates. Or you simply may not want to have a ticket that has zero flexibility and is 100% non-refundable, and you may be willing to pay more to buy some flexibility. Your next best option if you want to make your booking in English is to use the raileurope.co.uk site. Best of all is, as it always has been, to use the voyages-sncf.com web site and work through the process in French. If you do a dummy run in English with tgv-europe.com and print off each page as you go it should make it easy for you to follow the process on voyages=sncf.com even if you have very limited French.
Without wishing to sound paranoid about all of this, it does seem that the changes that have been made on tgv-europe.com are specifically designed to drive North American customers to the grossly over-priced US RailEurope site.
One last comment: Before you complete your purchase on RailEurope the site makes a push to have you buy insurance, in my case costing $9 on a $71 ticket, to protect your ticket value in the event of %26quot;illness or injury, railroad strike, or loss or theft in Europe.%26quot; The sales pitch includes this patently false statement: %26quot;Although the European railroads%26#39; policy is that NO [emphasis added] rail pass or ticket is refundable or replaceable...%26quot; etc., etc. European railroads do in fact have a refund policy for most tickets, although there may be a fee or forfeit of some part of the cost, and tickets can be refunded for any reason, not just the restricted reasons allowed by RailEurope.
RailEurope is a wholly owned subsidiary of SNCF. It is unfortunate that it apparently sees its North American customer base as a source from which to extract excessive profits by using deceptive marketing techniques, punitive and unnecessary added fees and charges, and by over-charging for its products. Moving to make it even more difficult for us to avoid those practices is IMO an act of bad faith vis-à-vis North American travelers.
Caveat emptor — and let%26#39;s hope SNCF doesn%26#39;t find a way to close the few remaining loopholes that remain to us to avoid RaiEurope.
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Translating those tickets from French into American costs a lot of money. Obviously they have to charge more on Raileurope!
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%26lt;%26lt;RailEurope is a wholly owned subsidiary of SNCF. It is unfortunate that it apparently sees its North American customer base as a source from which to extract excessive profits by using deceptive marketing techniques, punitive and unnecessary added fees and charges, and by over-charging for its products. Moving to make it even more difficult for us to avoid those practices is IMO an act of bad faith vis-à-vis North American travelers. %26gt;%26gt;
You know, a lot of taxes are paid by residents of France and by France to the EU. So, if prices are different for residents of France, residents of UK or Great Britain, that might be a more reasonable explanation than %26quot;bad faith%26quot; toward North Americans.
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%26lt;%26lt;North American site, raileurope.com.%26gt;%26gt;
Are you sure Canadians are redirected to raileurope?
%26lt;%26lt;The bottom line here is that the recommendation to use tgv-europe.com and select Great Britain now ONLY works if you are purchasing PREMs tickets.%26gt;%26gt;
I believe it will also work for the purchase of iDTGV tickets which are often less expensive than even PREMs. iDTGV tickets must be printed by the purchaser and are not available for pickup at a service window or boutique.
%26lt;%26lt;So, if prices are different for residents of France, residents of UK or Great Britain, that might be a more reasonable explanation than %26quot;bad faith%26quot; toward North Americans.%26gt;%26gt;
This is an interesting argument and one with which I might agree except why are only Americans charged these price premiums?
If I select Canada or Uganda as my country, I am able to purchase tickets at the same prices as Europeans. This gouging of only Americans is outrageous.
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%26gt;%26gt;%26gt;This is an interesting argument and one with which I might agree except why are only Americans charged these price premiums?%26lt;%26lt;%26lt;
Exactly. If we follow that logic would it then be permissible for US airlines to charge French travellers a surcharge in excess of 100% on everry trip they make within the US? After all it is US Taxpayers who pay for the airports, air traffic control network and all the rest of the infrastructure that makes those flights possibe. What about a 100% surcharge on all cars rented by French visitors? Wouldn%26#39;t the same argument apply there?
%26gt;%26gt;%26gt;This gouging of only Americans is outrageous.%26lt;%26lt;%26lt;
That it is. I%26#39;m not sure that a case can be made that what SNCF is doing is a violation of free trade agreements between the USA and France but if it is not it should be. Perhaps we should organize all the Americans on these boards to bring this to the attention of their congressional representatives, some of whom, I need hardly point out, would like nothing better than to have an excuse to publicly bash the French for discriminating against Americans...
As for your other points, Sarastro, my use of the term %26quot;North American%26quot; was a bit intentionally vague. I didn%26#39;t know for sure if Canadians were or were not redirected to the RailEurope site. Having already spent more than enough time investigating this and writing my somewhat lengthy (Did I hear someone say too lengthy?) post I decided to let somebody correct me on that point. And yes, you are correct about the iDTGV tickets. I forgot about those. Thanks for setting me straight on both points.
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Is it necessary to buy TGV tickets a long time in advance? Am I very naive to think I could turn up to Gare Montparnasse to buy a ticket to Tours on the next train? How far in advance would I need to purchase a ticket?
TIA
Fi
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%26lt;%26lt;Is it necessary to buy TGV tickets a long time in advance?%26gt;%26gt;
Not necessary IF seats remain available and you will probably pay more (unless you%26#39;re using the raileurope site) than purchasing in advance.
Ideally you can find a PREM fare which goes on sale 3 months before any departure date. Once the PREMs are sold, they are gone, and yes I know about the last minute, unsold PREMs offered on the voyages-sncf.com site from 2-5 days before a given departure date.
%26lt;%26lt;,I didn%26#39;t know for sure if Canadians were or were not redirected to the RailEurope site.%26gt;%26gt;
Well I have pretended to be a Canadian and was NOT redirect to the raileurope website unlike those suckers are from below the 49th parallel, HEY.
And by the way IR, you have done a lot of work which we all appreciate but be careful about burning out and then leaving us again for a few more empty years.
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I haven%26#39;t booked any French train tickets from the US since this spring but there are/were two really helpful sites to do just that. Try www.seat61.com first and see if that helps any. It should. Another site is ehow.com and search for %26quot;how to book French train tickets%26quot; That phrase works on Google as well. Either one or both of these sites should be of some assistance. I was able to purchase tickets and print them on my home computer in the US. I did list France as country of origin and did have to use the French language site. I had printed out the English language form and was able to follow along quite well--the forms are the same format-- and had tickets in hand long before we ever left the States.
oprah44
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Amongst the other oddities with the SNCF %26#39;system%26#39; over the past few months - I used to be able to get onto the US raileurope.com site to admire the prices, but I%26#39;m now consistently redirected to the UK site. There are no SNCF cookies on the computer, just a UK ISP identity, so it may only be a matter of time before everyone is automatically directed to their national agency.
What are the legalities in the US? Is a company like SNCF (or a fast food chain or whatever) allowed to create an exclusive agency / franchise arrangement for selling their product? Are any US taxes applied to consumer products which may bump up the price? Or is it just the revenge of the freedom fries?
It%26#39;s one of the paradoxes of TA - we identify and publish the loopholes in the system, so the company can then close them and maintain profit margins.
On the other hand, (and I%26#39;m not offering, just speculating), there may be a business opportunity here for someone to provide a ticket-forwarding service from, say, the UK ;-)
And I do agree with Sarastro%26#39;s comment, Irish, your wisdom and knowledge were greatly missed while you had a sabbatical .....
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Yesterday, I booked tickets on tgv-europe.com for a trip from Paris to Strasbourg. I was not as concerned about the price as I was about a delivery fee. I entered Great Britain as my home base, was offered several price options for each segment (to include special idtgv internet prices). The end result was two different kinds of tickets (one segment was idtgv) and the only %26quot;glitch%26quot; is that I need to print them at home separately. I%26#39;ve printed them and paid no additional delivery costs.
The TGV internet only purchase site is: idtgv.com. It seems to be a great option with good prices. Of course, the further in advance you buy, the better deals you can find.
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I hesitate before intervening in a transatlantic spat, but I would make a few points. Firstly, although www.voyages-sncf.com is in French, it can be used for straightforward bookings and checking schedules by people who are far from fluent in the language. Indeed, many of the words used (Depart, Arrivee, etc) are immediately recognisable to Enlish users. It is useful to know that Horaires is Timetables. As to picking up tickets at a Station or SNCF Boutique, this is not too much of a hardship. It is hardly the fault of SNCF that US banks still issue credit cards which depend on old-fashioned magnetic stripes rather than embedded chips so that they cannot be used in machines.
There are times when I find it useful to talk to a real person in English. I recognise that I am lucky in bein able to get to the Rail Europe travel centre in London or use their phone line - linked with raileurope.co.uk. They charge a booking fee and at times may make a bit from currency exchange fluctuations, but the extra may be worth for the advice and personal contact.
If American travellers are visiting London before France and have left it too late to get reduced price advance purchase tickets and are worried about dealing with French ticket offices, the option exists of taking a trip to the Rail Europe office at the bottom of Regent Street bewteen Piccadilly Circus and St James%26#39;s Park.
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