If you try to buy train tickets with a senior discount from a machine or online you can with the expectation that if asked you can show your passport to prove your age. A live agent, however, would not let you do this because now you need to have purchased a "senior card" for 60 €. This effectively wipes out the senior discount. When you use the train, you get busted for not having the card. You have to buy another full fare ticket and pay a fine. The machine never asks you for a card number or to insert the card into the machine. An agent privately admitted to me that "there is a huge difficulty here" It seems that this situation has been set up to increase the prevalence of fines.
Posted by
Coeur d'Alene
378 posts
I don’t see this as a scam since the train website explains how to receive the discount with a card. My husband is disabled and where we used to live received a discount for the light rail. However, he had to have an ID from the transit system indicating he is disabled. When purchasing a ticket from a kiosk, no need to enter the ID number, but when riding on the train personnel can check anytime for a valid ticket.
Posted by
Panguitch, Utah
2707 posts
This is absolutely not an effort to mislead anyone just to collect fines. Failure on your part to understand how discounts operate does not automatically translate into some wild conspiracy or scam operated by the SNCF. The SNCF offers a number of discount programs such as those for family travel, weekend travel, young person travel as well as senior travel. Each of these programs requires the purchase of a card to qualify for the discount and all of this is explained on the SNCF website.
It might be a huge difficulty but only because people purchase tickets without reading the terms and conditions of sale. There are no secret agendas or conspiracies here, only a number of people who make erroneous assumptions and fail to exercise due diligence when using a system new to them.
Posted by
Rick Steves' Europe
16895 posts
SNCF has one set of senior discounts (on slower trains such as TER) that only require a passport as proof of age. Additional senior discounts, especially on faster trains, have long required a discount card. Cards good for a whole year, not priced for one-time use.
You don't have to "show" your card to the ticket machine or web shopping cart, since the standard is that you it to the conductor onboard the train. Perhaps someone books early and then their annual card expires before the date of travel, etc. The conductor is always the one to confirm that tickets are valid and being used properly. If you talked to a live agent, they were protecting you from buying the wrong thing.