Train travel in Spain. Has anyone used acprail.com to book tickets?

Are the prices as good as the Promo fares on the AVE trains offered by Renfe?

I have been aware of them since they were a BritRail Pass wholesaler to Rail Europe in previous years. They are based in Montreal. This is the first I've seen of their ticketing site serving other countries and it may be pretty new.

If you have a fixed schedule, no agency can improve on the price of advance discounted ticket purchase from the national rail company, RENFE.

Totally agree with Neil.

But just to clarify... there are no longer "national" operators in many European countries since the deregulation many years ago. It's just that in some there's still only one operator which happens to be the former "national" operator. That's partly the case in Spain where RENFE serves most of the train services (except in Catalonia, where railway services are offered by Renfe and by FGC, albeit not upon the same train lines).

Thanks very much for the information. We had originally looked at the Renfe website but couldn't get an English translation. The price through acprail is pretty close at this time for a September 7th trip from Barcelona to Madrid. We translated the Renfe site with google chrome and booked through them. Appreciate the help!

... glad to hear you solved it Jane, the Renfe website is notoriously known for it's unfriendliness... it's very badly designed (in all of its language versions!).

Also for info, for regional trains -should you want to do escapades- you don't need to pre-book and you can purchase the tickets the day of the escapade at the station. Yet if you need to check schedules online, for regional trains in Catalonia I strongly advice to use this site instead of Renfe's: http://rodalies.gencat.cat/en/index.html Firstly because it's more accurate (as it's managed by the authority in charge of regional trains in this region) but most importantly because it's far more user-friendly.

Thank you for sharing this information about acprail.com
I'm in Montreal and will definitely be looking into them.
I will be travelling in Spain by train in October and finding RENFE's website quite challenging to consult.

I have a post in the Transportation section regarding using the RENFE website.