Car Rental outside of Paris for touring France

I-5 through Sacramento during rush hour is a piece of cake. It may get busy, but it is simple- no round-abouts or anything like that.

Thanks for the input. I'd also come to the conclusion that TGV to Provence would be the way to go due to time constraints. Knowing that it is a boring drive is icing.

In that vein, I am having trouble booking TGV PREM tickets to Arles thru their website. I keep getting "A technical error has prevented us from registering your payment" response. The price is so much less on the TGV-Europe.com than RailEurope.com, that it is making me crazy. Any ideas?

Best idea: WAIT FOR TIM.

The obvious question is: Where are you planning to stay in Paris?

Take the TGV to Provence and pick up the car there. Then head up to Chamonix and Normandy and return the car at the airport. You shouldn't have problems between Normandy and CDG because CDG is north of Paris, as is Normandy, so you won't have to deal with metro area traffice. I've driven between Paris and Provence two different ways and it kind of sucks. It's not very scenic, you're likely to encounter road construction and traffic, and it's SO SO SO much slower than the train.

Christy has the idea. Paris to Aix (or anywhere else down there) is a really mean drive.

Linda,

Call your credit card provider's customer service number and find out if your purchase is showing up at all on their system. Their computer may be blocking your transaction for unusual, and therefore suspected fraudulent, activity. If that indeed is the case, have the customer service person unblock everything and then stay on line with you while you try to book again.

After multiple attempts over two days, while availability of the sncf.com E80 fare, and other low fares vanished, I bit the bullet & went with RailEurope, for $174, sadly, but for a refundable ticket. So, I'll try back at sncf.com periodically to see what's what. thanks to all

I am also having problems booking PREM Paris-Avignon rail tickets through tgv-europe.com. I keep getting the message "A technical error has prevented us from registering your payment". I had already called my credit card company a few days ago and alerted them that I would be making purchases via TGV-europe.com.

Oh, yeah, another funny thing is that I tried this transaction 3 times earlier this evening, each time choosing upper deck dual face to face, using three different credit cards. I now tried it a 4th time and it tells me the dual face to face option is not available -- almost as if the earlier ticket sales went through. I'm afraid this is going to be a mess to clear up.

So, I called one of the credit card companies and they said the charge currently shows up in the MasterCard system. Sure hope it will be reversed since the transaction did not go through. Today is the first day the tickets are available for my travel date. Wonder if that's the problem? Or, wonder if the fact that I chose e-ticket is the problem? I'll accept any help offered!

Lisa,

Choosing an e-ticket should not cause a booking problem. Neither should the fact that you tried to book on the first possible day.

I don't know if it will make any difference, but once you get all the transactions cleared that you already attempted, try booking without selecting any seats. Letting the system pick your seats might help you avoid getting a "technical error" message. (I'm only guessing here.)

Hey Lisa, I'd be interested to know if you end up being successful in acquiring those tickets After my five or six futile attempts, I gave up. However, for a few days, my c/c showed three pending charges for those attempts. The charges did eventually get cleared out. Unpleasant experience all the way around. Got teased by the great value that I couldn't bring to fruition.

Thanks for the suggestion, Tim.

And, Linda, I'll post my outcome here.

I've been using Firefox for the transaction -- might try IE or Safari next time.

Well, I finally had success buying the PREM Paris-Avignon tickets on TGV-Europe.com. Here's the saga:

1. Attempted purchase several times on evening of Saturday, 7/17/10, which was first day possible to purchase for my travel date. At the time, each purchase ended with "A technical error has prevented us from registering your payment" and I also received Cancel emails from TGV.

2. Called my primary VISA credit card company and they told me the transactions displayed as pending. They said that if the vendor ended up canceling the transaction that it would happen after the 3rd day. They suggested I wait until today (4th day) to try purchase again.

3. Possible complicating factor on original purchase attempts: Even though I called my credit card companies and told them of impending foreign transaction, I still had a Sunday msg on my home phone from my primary VISA provider, asking me to confirm suspicious charges (I was out of town when I attempted the charges). So, it could be that the charges were somehow sidetracked at time of original purchase attempt. But, this still doesn't explain why the charge did not go through when I tried my Amex (there was no follow-up on suspicious activity from Amex).

4. Happy ending: I tried the purchase today (Wed) and it went through. I had a rep from my VISA card issuer on the line with me, but she said it didn't appear anything was different on their end today than it was on Saturday. Maybe she was just a good luck charm.:-) Only bad thing was that the PREM fare was 15 Euro higher today than it was on Saturday. But still much, much less than railpass or Rail Europe.

5. Used Internet Explorer for today's purchase and previously had been using Firefox.

So, those are all the clues I can provide. Hope I have good luck when I attempt to purchase the return tickets next week!

Thanks everyone for your help and suggestions.

Lisa made a really good point. Try Explorer. I use Firefox all the time. A number of times when I've tried to do transactions on the web, I've been stymied. Then I think to switch to Explorer, and frequently that solves the problem.