Please sign in to post.

Purchasing Train Tickets in Italy

We are familiar with train travel in Europe and within Italy. We bought roundtrip train tickets from Rome to Assisi through RailClick and used the Trenitalia app to check in before departure and present the tickets to the train manager when they came to our seats to confirm our tickets. This worked fine for our trip from Rome to Assisi, however the tickets back to Rome we were not able to pull them up in the Trenitalia app for some unclear reason. The return tickets would not show up in the app, Trenitalia website or when using the confirmation email we received from RailClick. We were therefore unable to check in for our trip prior to departure which is required before boarding the train. We discussed this problem with the train station ticket employee in Assisi who was also unable to bring up our tickets in the Trenitalia app or website or check us in. He was unable to change or cancel our tickets and suggested we discuss this with the train manager when our train stopped at the station prior to our boarding which would be a risk for us missing our train if the manager was not able to assist us at that time, which was likely to happen. We otherwise needed to call RailClick and have them change our tickets or cancel them so we could purchase new tickets. However, RailClick was not available by phone, despite calling during business hours over and over again and did not respond to our email sent to them asking for help with our return trip. We had little time to remedy this problem given our train departure time was approaching. Despite multiple attempts calling RailClick and emailing them without any response, we were left with buying new tickets through Trenitalia.

Upon returning to Rome, we sent follow-up emails to RailClick describing the problem we had and requested a refund for the tickets we were not able to use. RailClick has refused to provide any refund and had no apology for our trouble. We thoroughly regret using RailClick and suggest you avoid buying tickets from them as you are taking a significant risk given they have no customer support and will not assist you if needed.

Posted by
5498 posts

Most regular posters on this forum always strongly recommend buying your tickets directly from the official site, whether plane, train, hotel, or attraction. Using 3rd party sites always runs the risk of snafus such as you experienced. Had you purchased your tickets on the Trenitalia site, the problem could have been avoided.

Posted by
29 posts

I used the app from TrenItalia when I was in Liguria and Tuscany last spring. It worked well for me (I just used it when I was on wifi). I did have an issue with one of their ticket machines in the Cinque Terre but thankfully I just used Euros to buy a ticket in person as a backup. That's too bad about your experience. Cheers.