Printing out tickets in Europe

Some event venues scan the bar code on your printed ticket. It could depend on how the event staff verify the validity of your ticket.

We did it at our hotel in France. Most hotels catering to tourists will either have a computer you can use or will print tickets for you if you can forward them to the hotel's email.

Not quite so crucial as it used to be, but probably still worth making sure that you print to actual size and not to fit the (American-sized) page if doing it at home to avoid the bar codes being different from those expected. Or use A4 paper. ..

My train tickets printed on standard U.S. 8-1/2 x 11 paper seem to work just fine. Also used hotel printers on Europe. Might be a problem if you're renting an apartment.

The desk clerk at my hotel in Paris printed out my plane boarding pass for me. I had it in my email then forwarded it to the hotel's email. He printed from that email.

My train tickets printed on standard U.S. 8-1/2 x 11 paper seem to work just fine. Also used hotel printers in Europe.

Ditto.

Never heard of a problem with "letter" sized paper and scan codes. I still prefer the 8-1/2 x 11 size to the A4 as it's designed to be a pleasing ratio to the eye (Golden Mean) and it lays out a personal letter shaped block of text quite well and again is pleasing to the eye. I've never seen the advantage of the metric type sizing where the distance between Mars and some asteroid is divided by 10,000 (or whatever) and that that somehow makes for a better, more profound, shape to be using. I could also get into the issue of the A0 being too big to handle for blueprints and the A1 too small (not a problem with traditional 24" x 36" or 30" x 42" sizes) but that's a whole different topic.

I've done it both ways, printing at home and in Europe (and standard 8 1/2 X 11 paper works fine). I lean toward printing at home and having a folder with the tickets, backed up by electronic copies should I lose them and have to reprint. The reason is on several occasions the hotel desk was busy, the email was slow and the clerk moved on to help others, I was short on time. Once, the PDF simply would not print. At the time wished I had found that out at home. We eventually got it but much gesticulation and muttering in French.

I'm with Alan; print them out, but have the electronic file available. We stayed at a hotel in Paris (on the RS 21 Day BOE years ago) that gave us computer access, but wouldn't print anything out for us. We had to find an internet café to print our boarding passes. And they're not as easy to find now as they were then! Most hotels that we've stayed in either supplied a printer for the guests, or would print stuff out for us.

How about printing at the library?

Thanks everyone. It looks like it would be smart to print as many as you can in the US. Are the tickets always for a specific day, or are they for general admission for any day?

I have never had any issue with asking hotel staff to print tickets for me. They always seem happy to do it (without charge too).

Barbara, that's a good tip. We were able to print out some stuff we needed at the library in Salisbury this spring. And even though the RS guidebook said we'd have to pay for more than 30" access, the librarian just smiled and gave us all the time we needed.