Has anyone from the US managed to register for the RENFE train website? Keeps indicating improper format of phone number.
When we went to Spain, I found Renfe very frustrating to use. I opted to use trainline.com. And trainline allows you to compare and book trains other than Renfe. If there is a price difference (many times there was not), the one or two euros was worth not having to waste my time. Good luck.
Depending on where you're going you can maybe use Iryo instead, www.iryo.eu . Their website is much more user friendly.
I had the same issue last spring on a trip to Spain. Entered my number on one page, then had to enter it again on another - but it had no country code for the US and no way to manually enter it. I gave up, used trainline instead. Much easier.
After reading all the reviews about the difficulty of using the RENFE website, I didn't bother with it. I booked one of my tickets through IRYO; for the rest, I paid the small fee and used Trainline. Both were easy to use.
Having an account and being familiar with Renfe was a life saver for me several months back. I had a travel emergency and needed to change plans quickly - as in taxi to the station and grab a train. With the Renfe app, I could quickly check the train schedules and purchase tickets as I was literally on the fly.
I've used the website for a number of years. First on the Web, then as an app. I do know that it can be finicky, but I have rarely had difficulties. I use an iPhone for the app.
I don't remember how I inputted my phone number - with +1 or just with 1. Actually - I just logged into my account. It shows "Prefix - +1" and then the 10 digit number without repeating country code.
We're in Italy not US but had the same problem. That is the site wouldn't accept the phone number.
Then we realised you can buy tickets without registering on the site, so we did. A couple of weeks later my husband tried again to register just out of curiosity and was able to using an Italian landline number
Thank you to everyone for the helpful responses. We have used Trainline in the past but they were of no help when a train in the UK was cancelled at the last minute. I was hoping to be able to register with RENFE but I still have not been successful adding our phone number online or with the app. We have now booked with the Trainline website. I just dont understand why RENFE hasn't fixed this. I see many others have the same problem. We are excited for our upcoming Spain/ Morroco 6 week trip!
It's good to read all the comments about the horrid Renfe site. I should have looked here a couple days ago. It took forever to book three trips inside Spain for next month. My favorite was putting all the information into the site, except for our passport numbers. I went to get them and came back in a few minutes only to find out. - it timed out and I needed to start all over. Now, I wanted to try to register with Renfe so I could have all our tickets in one place but the USA phone number keeps getting rejected. I will try a fake number to force it to accept the registration. Does anyone know if registering even accomplishes my goal of having the tickets all in one place?
I have been using the Renfe site, and found that the first time I enter my US phone number, it doesn't accept the tenth digit, but entering the last digit again works. I have registered for "Más Renfe" which fills in some of my information automatically when I log in prior to doing a train search. But the site is really screwy for payment: it rejected my credit card twice and I wound up using a different one. I may try the app but I want to avoid having to type everything on my iPhone.