Planning on a middle of the week trip to avoid weekend Christmas crowds in Cologne and I want to buy two round trip ICE tickets from Amsterdam to city center Cologne (Koln Hbf?) for mid December. The tickets for sale are not up yet but will be soon so I want to be able to jump on it.
1] I can buy ICE tickets on the ns.nl site but the Man in Seat 61 says to use the www.bahn.de site. Does it make any difference which site I use?
2] Am I correct in understanding that we will scan the bar code on our tickets at Centraal to get through the gates to get to the platform but the conductor on the ICE train will also check our tickets and that I need to have credit card with me that was used for the transaction?
Anything else I should know?
Thank you.