Still need to print out train tickets when you have QR Code?

You don't need to print out the tickets, and nearly no one prints out tickets anymore.

But my family does try to be redundant with our train QR's. I do a screenshot of them so I have them in two places on my phone not one, and I send them to my wife's phone as well so if a phone somehow went missing ...

Thank you! Screenshots is a great idea

Vote #2 for the screenshot! I go further and add the screenshot to both an album in photos and to the notes section.

The QR code is so much easier as you don’t have to validate them.

To be slightly more specific, and likely I'm overdoing it, for each ticket I take a screenshot of the entire ticket, and then a more zoomed in screenshot of the QR code.

I'm not sure why exactly, either expanding the QR code from the screenshot of the entire ticket, or just using the zoomed in screenshot both seem to work

Good God ! Why not just take printed copies ! They don't take up space and weigh nothing . I can't understand why everything has to involve a cellphone .

Steve I book stuff all the time when traveling including last spring a bunch of last minute train tickets. Getting things printed while traveling is often very difficult; it is rare that any apartment has a working printer. The QR on the phone is so easy. I usually transfer the tickets to my notes file on the phone so it is easy to call up when needed.

We all book museum tickets on the fly -- same deal -- printing is an enormous hassle and many train tickets in France cannot be printed at the station -- you have a phone or you print them at home.

Actually they do feel heavy but I didn’t weigh them. I’ve got reservations for about half a dozen timed entries and it seems like the ones I printed at home had 3 pages. Much easier to have them on my phone.

I agree with Janet on booking on the fly…yep wasn’t sure how my time would work out for a museum in Milan Tuesday. I had extra time and booked it on the walk there.

Booked the train ticket via the app from the hotel yesterday morning when I decided what time I wanted to leave.

I'm over here now for nearly three months , have prints of all my tickets ( trains , museums , concerts etc . The paper I carry amounts to a negligible weight . Any time I book something on the fly , the confirmation that I receive by email , suffices for getting admitted . For example , I just purchased tickets for three concerts at The Musikverein in Vienna later this month , the confirmation is all I need to obtain entry . I believe in keeping things simple , and as I read this , the OP has the tickets and is going through hoops trying to avoid bringing a few sheets of paper . I really fail to see the logic in this . No offense , Pam .

Steven, I'd like to respectfully echo other posters in that it's not always easy to get things printed. I work from home and don't have a printer (I don't ever need one), so if I were to want to print out anything before I leave, I would literally have to make a special trip to a FedEx / Staples / print store to print a few sheets of paper. If on the road you're staying somewhere (say an AirBNB, like the one where I was just in Bucharest) where there isn't a printer, that also requires going out and running an express errand.

This is not to say that I don't understand the appeal of printing things -- I religiously print boarding passes when I'm at the airport, because the machines are there.

But I mostly just want to say, it's absolutely fine to believe in keeping things simple, but it'd be nice to consider that "simple" is not the same thing for everyone. For me, printing is definitely not simple.

Thanks Andrew, I completely agree with you and that's the situation I'm in - if I could and I have the doubt, I would definitely print it just in case. But currently I'm first time in France, just purchased the tickets, not staying in a hotel and having the language barrier, going to find a place to print will be time-consuming and difficult.

Steve, We don’t have a printer and have to walk a kilometer or more or take the tram to get to an internet/print shop to print anything. We save that extravagance for legal documents, special forms. Our library doesn’t provide the service. Hope you two are having a great trip.

Not relevant to the OP, but for standard TGV tickets, it is very easy to print ticket slips at the self-service machines in the station. If I remember correctly, the machines are able to retrieve your tickets just with the credit card you booked them with, so no need to mess with reservation numbers. That way, you do not have to use your phone to flash the QR code at the platform gates, and you do not have to print tickets at home. I do not use this feature often since I have a physical "Grand Voyageur" SNCF loyalty card whose QR code links to the tickets on my account (fancy, right 😅?) but it can be helpful.

If I don’t have a printer handy, I just have the QR code on my phone.

I do like to print my hotel, museum & train reservations at home ahead of time (in case my phone was stolen during my trip), but I will say that they do start to get heavy. I had 13 hotels and 18 separate train tickets for my June trip. I joked with Pam on this forum that only our forum travelers would understand that I actually got out the scissors and cut off the borders and the bottom half-sheet advertisement on the train tickets! Anything to keep it light! ; )

Thanks, Bets , it's been wonderful , we're about at the halfway point in Switzerland now . Headed for Luzern today , on the way to Germany and Austria .

Steven, no offense taken. I’m trying to drag myself into the modern world by doing everything on my phone.

Thank goodness for our local travel group as Aimee was instrumental in getting me organized with ApplePay, lol. And Jean and her scissors!!

I’ve gone super light this trip so I did not want anything extra. Last trip in April I started with about 2 pounds of paper, lol.

Hope it’s not raining in your Swiss destination because I’m in Varenna and the Swiss mountains I can see from here are drenched!!

Pam , good to hear from you . The last five days in Wengen were heavy with cloud cover

( like the fifties movie " The Crawling Eye " ) , and light rain that came and went . Still able to enjoy it , it's a really beautiful place, even with that weather . Now in Luzern , the weather is forecast to improve dramatically in the coming week . Back to Rigi in a day or two ,and a visit to Tribschen , high on the list https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribschen . How about Como ?

Paper kills trees and produces waste. Not everything needs to be printed.

no not everything should be printed, but many things should be. most larger hotels have a computer and printer specifically in the lobby for boarding passes and tickets, or there might be a business center or you could ask the front desk to do it. At the CDG Hilton they specifically give you a little slip of paper with the email of their business and office and say, if there's anything you want us to print just forward it here.

Even a dinosaur such as me realizes that the future is contained in electronic storage devices. I have had plenty of time to contemplate this harsh fact when standing behind someone frantically flipping through a pocket computer to locate a code or ticket or document.

This trip I have been saving the pdf in Tripit (Pro). Makes it super easy to find rather than scrolling through emails. I have email folders but sometimes it takes a bit. We were traveling on the fly. A couple times we did not make reservations until the night before. One time the Air BnB did not get back to us so we arrived Strasbourg with nothing. I do need to label the pdf's for each of us. One train trip my partner scanned hers then I presented hers again. Took a sec to figure out which was which.