I was in the train station in Cadiz with about an hour before the train was to leave. I took a ticket in the train office to buy the tickets. Has the time ticked away and the line moved really slow. I started to worry that an hour wouldn’t be enough to buy tickets in the small train station.
So I created an account on Renfe and entered all four passengers, names and passports and selected seats so that I could buy the tickets online.
Then, for some reason, my credit card wasn’t going through. And I had to activate my cell line to get mobile data to call my card company.
By the time I got that sorted out, I went to complete the purchase on my phone and now I started getting all kinds of errors from them that the seats side selected were no longer available. I didn’t see a way of clearing the selections and starting over.
At that point the train was going to leave in about three minutes. I found a conductor who was in the midst of a personal phone call the side of the train. I waited for him to get off. Then I asked him in Spanish if I could just buy the ticket on the train using a credit card or cash. He said a credit card wouldn’t work, but I could pay for the ticket with cash. He said to just get on the train and wait in this one particular car and then once the train was moving, he came to see us to collect the cash and printed up the tickets on a mobile machine.
I don’t know if this works on all their trains, but it made the difference between leaving and not. Because the train after that was completely sold out. And if we’d had to wait two hours or more, it would’ve been a dealbreaker.
Incidentally, even though we were seated in some empty seats and he printed the tickets for us. A few minutes later, some other passengers came and evicted us because they had those seats reserved. The seats that had been allotted to us were actually several cars down the train. Just ready for that.