Buying train tickets on OBB website with an american credit card

Have you told your credit / debit card company you are making a purchase on a foreign website?

PayPal ?? It's my backup method when I don't want to fool around with cards any more.

Have you registered on the site ? That often smooths the way .

I had the same problem for tickets in May - tried two different VISA cards. I had told my credit card companies. I let a couple of weeks go by and tried again and it went through fine. Who knows? Good luck.

Can you buy the same tickets on the German railroad site?

If they are international tickets, you might be able to do that. For some reason, the Deutsche Bahn site seems to be better at playing with others than the ÖBB site.

Thanks everyone, I appreciate the comments and questions. I did contact my credit card companies before attempting the purchase and after receiving the error message. They both told me that they had not received a request to purchase. I tried again after entering this post and looked more closely at the error message and this is what it said: We were unable to identify your credit card during the 3-D secure process. Please contact your credit card issuer. It does say to enter your 3-D secure id before clicking the purchase button but there is no place to enter anything and I don't know what the 3-D secure id is. Any and all suggestions is greatly appreciated

This is the technical explanation of 3-D Secure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-D_Secure

It is an additional authentication step when making a payment in the Internet, i.e. your credit card company asks you for a password of which the merchant is unaware of. So a fraudulent merchant cannot use your credit card even kowing all the details of your card.

As far as I know you must have this feature activated. In Austria at least cardholders of VISA and MasterCard were forced to have 3-D Secure in place.

I had a similar problem with the Visa 3-D verification not working on either of my Visa cards. I ended up using Paypal to make my purchases, although I wanted the security of making the purchase through a credit card. I thought there might also be a problem with using the "unsupported browser" (Safari on my Mac). Guess I will have to remember that when I make future purchases.

I looked into getting tickets via Deutsche Bahn instead, and the prices were considerably higher for traveling from Vienna to Passau. I think purchasing the tickets from the railway of the country where you are traveling the longest amount seems cheaper. I might be wrong, though.

Good luck.

I also had a difficult time with this and made lots of calls to my credit card companies. The issue is a special layer of protection that's on the OBB site, and none of my credit cards have that option -- except for my American Express. So if you have an AE card, try that. That's the only one I could get to go through.

Thanks for the AE suggestion. Were you able to get the 3-D secure ID from AE that is referenced on the OBB site?

Contact your card issuers to set up the Verified by Visa or MasterCard SecureCode features. I believe that's the "3D" step you mentioned, and that should eliminate the problems with "card not present" transactions. Once you have that set-up, there will be an extra step in making the purchases, but they should be processed.

I've done that with my cards, but can't remember how I did it.

hi, I am having the same problem. The tickets do look like they are available on the calendar but they are not. OBB does not grey out dates that are beyond their selling point. I went to another site, I believe the German site, and put in my dates and it came up as unavailable. I then backtracked date wise day by day until i found an eligible date. it was two weeks prior to my date. so now i am waiting for the OBB to get to my dates of travel. Hope this helps.