Confusing train travel prices

The cheapest tickets sell out first, so the best time to buy is immediately after tickets for your dates go on sale. Unfortunately, Renfe seems rather erratic in making tickets available. It appears that there is no alternative to checking that website every day until the dates you want show up. If you can make it work with your credit card (or use the often-recommended PayPal instead), buying from Renfe should assure that you are seeing all available options and not paying any extra fees.

Both Loco2 and Trainline are often recommended on this forum. I believe Loco2 has no service charges and Trainline's fees are very low. I cannot explain the variances you report, but I suspect the cheapest (promo) tickets for your dates haven't been released yet, so you may be seeing speculative prices rather than actual prices.

Thanks Acraven. Hoping someone knows and trusts Goeuro as they have the best prices of the 3. Will keep researching and hope someone knows them.

March 15-19 is the hugely popular Las Fallas festival in Valencia. If there were promo tickets, they must have sold out. I haven't tried to work out the dates for the rest of your tries, but Semana Santa is from April 13-21, another time that weekend travel is very heavy and promo tickets could be sold out.

I have always used renfe.com, the official site. There are multiple types of trains on that route and multiple fare options. Renfe is currently showing a Euromed train at 9.00 (3 hours 18 min) for €13.60 promo or €15.90 promo+.

Thanks for the info Chani. I tried going to Renfe but don’t know Spanish well enough. I also read there are troubles with Renfe and credit cards. But I’m willing to try it. Could you somehow help me understand how to purchase through Renfe? Like maybe a step by step instructions on what to select? Thanks

Also Chani, that 9am train is exactly the one I want. It gets you in to Valencia at 12:18.

Renfe has an English version
http://www.renfe.com/EN/viajeros/index.html

Maybe your credit card will work like mine does.

Thanks Jazz +! When I went to the site, it started in English but once I "continued" to the next section, it went back to spanish! I can do a little spanish but not much.

Anyway, all I did was start copying the spanish text, paste it into a translate thing and et voila, was able to figure things out. Totally proud of myself! Now it took a bit to get it right (30-40 mins) cause we did select some wrong things but in the end we did it AND our credit card worked just fine (got a text right away from our cc co asking if we had done the transaction.) The tickets came out to 18 euros each. :- )

Hi,
Try seat 61. More formally, google:the man in seat 61. This website can really be useful, especially for the confusing Renfe ticket system

Wayne