I just realized that I bought train tickets from Amsterdam to Paris for my daughters using their nicknames. My family will all be traveling together, and they are both teenagers. RailEurope can change these tickets, but only if I pay about $100 in cancellation fees.
Has anyone else experienced this recently (cross-border European ticket), and if so, was the passenger allowed to travel?
Trains are not aircraft. Your passports will not be checked either before the train or on it, and nobody will give the proverbial about what you daughters' exact names are.
To expand a little - there is no passport check to board the train. Occasionally there may be a random passport check on board the train as you cross a border, but they will only be interested in passports and not in the name written on the ticket. The people checking the rail ticket will only be interested in whether the ticket is valid, and won't want to see passports or have any interest in names.
And many times a group ticket will be issue in one name only for four people. The other issue is that you probably should not be dealing with RailEurope. Their tickets tend to be pricy.
This happened to me one time with a Savings Fare (then Dauer Spezial) ticket in Germany. I used the login on the Bahn that I had created years before, using my nickname, but my credit card that had to be used for ID had my given name. When the pdf file arrived and I saw the discrepancy, I phoned them right away. The man on the phone said he couldn't do anything about it, but 10 minutes later I got a new pdf file with the name changed.
I later contacted my bank, and they would have reissued my credit card with the nickname.
Have you seen the ticket yet? Does it have their names on it? I don't know what RailEurope does, but most full fare tickets I've seen have not had names on them. Discount tickets have only had the name on the credit card, not other co-travelers. And I don't think your passport will be checked nor do I believe they would compare it to the name on the ticket.
Reason #56 not to use RailEurope...I bet they had no problem taking your cancellation fee, but didn't bother explaining that this isn't a problem. Great service - NOT!
