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Purchase LON-SOU tickets from the US?

Posted by (Mason, Michigan ) on

Greetings...
We sail from Southampton on 8/15/24 after 4 days in London. The plan was to take the train from Waterloo to Southampton. I get 90% of the way through online selecting the trains/fare (£52). National Rail then sends me to South Western Rail and I have to register to purchase. Yet it rejects anything other than a UK address. Am I missing something?

I did a search on this site and some older posts say there is nothing to be gained by buying in advance. I did a "test" by entering an outbound date 3 days from now with the same return date thinking I could buy the tickets when we get to London. The RT price jumps to £76 (all in the outbound fare). Any advice? I need two RT tickets and £28 difference is something to be gained! (and let's not forget conversion rate...) Also, I am a pretty obsessive compulsive planner. I like things DONE and marked off in my spreadsheet!

Posted by
897 posts

Any train operating company is capable of selling any tickets for any route. If you're having trouble making a purchase through South Western Railway you sould be able to make the purchase through another company such as LNER or Avanti West Coast
https://www.lner.co.uk/
https://www.avantiwestcoast.co.uk/

Currently you can purchase Anytime Day Singles for £54.50, but you can get Advance Singles for as little as £14 (trains at 9:35, 10:35 and 11:35).

Posted by
589 posts

VAP's advice is the easiest option if you're having trouble, but SWR does accept foreign addresses - I have an account registered to ny foreign address. If you go to the registration form, you'll see the country box is set to United Kingdom, but if you click on it, it will give you a drop down list of countries.

Posted by
2 posts

I thought the same thing a few months ago, but it was because I had United Kingdom selected, as Simon mentioned. It wasn't obvious; the page defaults to UK, which makes sense. Once I realized that I could change the country, it accepted my US address and I successfully bought Southwestern Railway tickets for Waterloo to Portsmouth.

Posted by
1334 posts

I second the recommendation of just using LNER to buy tickets, the app works well in the USA and then you’ll have all your tickets in one place

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