DB train cancellation and booked alternative

This is what I keep repeating: Tickets are for a route, not a train. you have a ticket from Ljubljana to Munich Airport. (That is an S bahn to the airport, not a metro). That ticket is valid from 14.09 00:00 to 16.9 03:00. And good for one trip on that route on a train of your choosing.

You selected a train during your purchase from a schedule, and you may have been given a discount if you accepted train binding, but that train binding has now been lifted. It is now up to you to find an alternative and just use it. And since trains do not require reservations in this part of the world you can just choose one an take it.

This happens all the time when you book train tickets far in advance. We call this the "Sparpreis lottery". You pay for a sparpreis, but because DB changes its schedules all the time you end up with a fully flexible ticket, that would otherwise have costed a lot more. So this is normally something that one is happy about.

Now reservations live in their own universe. That your ticket conditions have changed does not affect your reservation. It may or may not be useful still, but this is not air travel. This is mass transit. You are expected to figure things out for yourself.

Looking up your travel date I see that the 11:08 still operates. You just have to change in Villach and will arrive in Munich Ost at 17:42. In order to keep the interruption to you, the traveller, to a minimum the connection is kept short. Six minutes. That is the railway doing its best at being a good railway. You can expect to make that connection, but if you don't, there is another train an hour after, and you just take that train then. Again, this is mass transit. You hop from train to train along your route until you are at your destination.
(Also, get used to using the 24h clock for train times)

So you can just stay with your original departure. For which trains do you have reservations? You could go to the station and get new ones, and if they do not give you those new ones for free afterwards claim that back from DB.

this is very strange, I can still access table format schedules begining December 2025 and changing June 2026 and there seems to have been no intention to run a direct train. What is the train, car and seat numbers from the original reservation? And just confirm that was booked in the DB Navigator App.

Your ticket is a contract to get you from Llubljana to Munich on the date shown - and if they have removed the one stated then you can use others on the same route. There would be no argument if you travelled on the revised split itinery at the same times as originally booked but I suspect your reservation is for a compeltely different type of train so they wouldn't be able to offer it from Villach.

Does the revised itinery in your App account come with a QR code which you can show on your phone? That should be all you need to confirm that the ticket is valid for the train. If the 11:22 - 11:28 connection at Villach is missed the next train north is 12:32, with a change at Salzburg and again at Munich Hauptbahnhof. Is the ticket booked to the airport?

to reiterate what WengenK posted whilst I was typing, it isn't a metro and there are 24 hours in a day!!!

to add to the confusion, I recalled an earlier query about trains from Slovenia to Munich and have now found it, it was on May 4th and even then we didn't have a direct train to discuss...

Yes, on April 7th I booked a direct train # EC 114, seats 75/76 on DB navigator. Thanks for the detailed explanation.

I guess I was so skilled at Italy trains….(High speed required one to take that train with assigned seat, regional, any train. ) but now I understand it’s different outside of Italy. Yes I have the QR code in the app and printed pdf with QR code.

I just didn’t want to be on the train and be told our tickets weren’t valid.

And I just have to pay for my reserved seats again, I see no way to find information on reserved seats in my journey?

One last comment. The Ec 114 train from Villach at 1:28 is the same train # that originally started in Ljubljana. The connection time leaving Ljubljana at 11:08 is 13 minutes, not 6. And both trains are EC. So I altered reservation to this one, and my seats show up on EC 114. So I’ll just need to reserve seats for the first leg. And since both trains are EC, I’m confident we will make the connection.

Again thanks for the help!

There was a plan to start running through trains from Zagreb and Ljubliana to Munich starting this summer. It appears however that this plan has been shelved, and the change in Villach remains. Probably for technical reasons. So EC 114

It used to be that EC114 came from Klagenfurt, and EC 214 came from Zagreb, and in Villach they were joined, and continued to Munich. Because this joining and splitting of trains takes time that means however that there is less time to recover from delays. You can have a whole trainload of passengers change trains in 2 minutes. Joining two trains together takes a lot longer...

So a few years ago they split the trains. EC214 was limited to Villach, and everyone had to change. Then last year the ÖBB opened the Koralmbahn, and as a result the whole Austrian long distance network was redesigned. So EC114 in stead of coming from Klagenfurt now originates in Villach.

And somewhere someone may have realised that it now makes a lot more sense to just run a through train Zagreb - Munich. You will notice that both EC 114 and EC 214 are named "Miramara". This is basically one train, run as two. Probably ÖBB does not have enough locomotives that are cleared to run both in Slovenia and Germany...

One consequence of the new long distance Austrian timetable is that there are now hourly trains from Villach direction Salzburg (and on to Munich) and at least hourly (but sometimes even better) on Villach - Vienna, so a missed connection there becomes a lot less dramatic. I do expect the EC114 however to wait for EC214 as long as the delay of the former is not to large.

There is a website, zugfinder.net, where you can look up a train and see its delay statistics. The last couple of weeks EC 214 was on time in Villach. A few days it ran late, but the maximum recent delay was 11 minutes, and on that date EC 114 did leave Villach with a small delay. Basically they held the train so that everyone could make the transfer.