SPAIN AVE TRAIN

I'd echo what Kathryn said; read the tripadvisor article first, and then the purchase is easy. You can save a lot on the AVE train if you buy in advance.

If you buy them ahead of time, you can save a considerable amount of money. They start selling about 60 days out on the renfe.es site. However, there are considerable challenges in actually purchasing on the website. Trip Advisor has an excellent tutorial on how to use the renfe site. After considerable tries, I was successful and saved about half of what I would have paid waiting until we got to Spain.

The benefits to purchasing ahead on this route are to ensure your place on the train you want...and to avoid standing in ticket lines at Atocha station. Otherwise, the price remains constant. If you do purchase ahead at www.renfe.com, you'll get a pdf file that you can save on your computer and print out before you leave....that's your ticket. There's no extra charge for the website purchases. Go to https://w1.renfe.es/vol/index.do and start your purchase there....you shouldn't have any problems.

While you can save money buying tickets online ahead of time, on this route the price is not much and as Norm points out, you might not get a discount becuase its more of a commuter route. Lines at Atocha can be very long (it took me 90 minutes to buy my ticket to Toledo) so avoiding the wait is the real benefit.

By purchasing your tickets ahead of time you'll also avoid hanging around the station waiting for a train that isn't sold out. That's what happened to us!

Once again, I reiterate that there is NO cost benefit to purchasing on-line for Madrid-Toledo. Other routes, yes....this one, no. The benefits involve having tickets in hand for the train you want, avoiding long lines at ticket windows and, as Bob said, getting stuck waiting for a train with seats available. This is a very popular route, both with tourists and locals, since Toledo, with the AVE connection is now essentially a bedroom suburb of Madrid.

So it's well after midnight in Spain on day 62 before I want to ride the train. I'm following the TripAdvisor tutorial, but I think the server is just plain fubar-ed. How much is the potential savings from Cordoba to Toledo? This might not be worth the aggravation...

Bill...they may still be loading the new fares in. This can take them a couple of hours, since they seem to do routine maintenance as well. You'll likely have to book Cordoba-Madrid then Madrid-Toledo, since there's no direct train. Regular price Cordoba-Madrid would be about 75 Euro, if memory serves...getting it on line would be as low as 30 Euro...60 per cent off.

All of you people on this site are much smarter than me. I have tried about 20 times (with and without the TripAdvisor Tutorial, which by the way is not totally accurate to how the website works) and tried 2 different credit cards (different banks) and with one credit card, my credit card company has no idea what I'm talking about and the other one wouldn't even process! Any suggestions anyone? There seem to be lots of available seats on the train the day we want to go (Madrid-Toledo) but all of you keep mentioning the long lines at the Atocha station so I'd like to buy before we go (next week) if possible.

Rosanne, I used a debit card tied to a bank checking account. After the purchase process Renfe gave me a message that they cannot continue to process my ticket purchase because of some bank issue. I then called the toll free # on the debit card and explained what I was trying to do. I was told they purposedly declined the purchase for security reasons and after verifying what I was trying to do, released the card for purchase and got the tickets. Good luck.

Thanks for all the useful information. I've purchased my Madrid-Toledo and Toledo-Madrid tickets and received the pdf tickets. The whole process was fairly straight forward except my bank kept rejecting the transactions for security reasons (foreign website, etc.) I had to call them a few times to get things fixed but from all the info you shared, it seemed like it was worth it. As one poster said, I paid the same price online as I would pay at the station. It was 20 euros for 2 + 8% tax but a todays conversion, it came to $25.43. Thanks again.

The process cannot continue right now. We apologise for any inconvenience (G001-R190)

Bill....it's 2 am in Spain right now....as I said earlier, they may still be loading in the new fares and/or doing routine maintenance. Try when you get up tomorrow morning.

"The process cannot continue right now. We apologise for any inconvenience" I got that a few times. Finally figured out what was happening is that my credit card company was declining the charge. I switched to a different card and it went thru. Or you could try calling the number on the back of your credit card and tell them to authorize the charge.

This is my fourth and final set of tickets I need to purchase, as we travel from Granada to Madrid, through all the highlight cities of Southern Spain. The bank has cleared the card. The site, which is typically down for a few hours just after midnight their time, had just come back up. I was down to the final step and,... poof. It's 7 there now, so I will patiently try again. P.S. - Sorry for all the extra posts Luis. This catharsis is helpful though, so thanks.

Bill...unfortunately, sometime the only way you can tell that they're still working on the website is to get to that final stage and get that error message. They need to do a better job of informing people that sales won't go thru before customers get to the penultimate step. But, since their focus is on Spanish customers, I guess they feel that's not necessary in the early morning hours. Hopefully, it works for you today!