Issue with buying train tickets online for Austria train

Lets face it, the new OEBB website is a disaster. Maybe they'll modify it when they get more feedback.
What leg are you looking at and when?

Absolutely agree with Sam - what an absolute disaster of a train planning site. There must be an alternative - can somebody find it?

Legs departing Salzburg, at the least, can be purchased through DB, so I would wait until 90 days out and use that much better booking engine for whatever it offers. Low prices will still be there and these trains don't require reservations if you didn't care about securing the discounts.

I'm glad it isn't just me. We want to travel from Vienna to Zurich on 5 December.....final destination Strasbourg, which can't be purchased until 90 days out anyway. We'll wait and get them both together. We are purposefully wanting the extended train trip as part of our journey (I know we could shave a few hours off by going through Germany).

We just lost $140US dollars using the ebb website for tickets from Austria to Hungary. On July 30th, my husband put in the date of our travel as 16/09/16 and the tickets came out marked 31/7/16. We emailed them twice and called twice, but was told they couldn't give us our money back or apply it to our actual trip.

I called VISA and am going to protest payment. Needless to say, we are pissed! Problem is, oebb is the easiest way we have found so far to get to Budapest from Vienna. If anyone knows a different and efficient way to get there, please let us know.

Oh, no...Kathy! That is terrible. I was worried about that when I saw the charges to my cc but I'm pretty determined to just get my tickets thru the dbahn website. I'm not sure about your options to get to Budapest.

You can always take a bus. There is also one hydrofoil that runs the Danube between the cities on alternate days. Of course it's more expensive than the train

I don't believe you can buy the tickets through Deutsche Bahn. Although the train does cut through Germany at one point, it does not stop there. You can buy them through SBB, but the price is slightly higher, even accounting for the currency difference. I saw saver fare for 2 including seat reservations as 115 CHF for Halloween. On the OEBB site it is 84 EUR Sparpreis with seat reservation. Anyway, at SBB you have to wait for the 92 day window.

Are people complaining to Oebb so they know how unhappy people are with the website?

Drilling down a bit further, it appears that OEBB uses 3-D Secure for credit card payments.

We ensure your payment security: If you pay using a MasterCard, VISA or American Express credit card, you will need to enter your 3-D Secure password. We use a secure SSL connection to transfer all data.

I take that to mean you will need to register your credit card with one of these payment services. Visa Checkout is the one for Visa cards.
https://usa.visa.com/pay-with-visa/visa-checkout.html?gclid=CJT_9oSnsM4CFQmpaQodP5cECw

Same deal with French train tickets through SNCF site.

Kathy, just made all of our train reservations for our trip in October through the DBahn website and it was very easy. Had to do some translation of the ticket information since it was all in German but I believe we got it. We are getting excited for our GAS tour in September.

I am very excited to hear all about your tour, Carole! I hope you will give us teasers as you go through your trip....like you did on your last tour!

Definitely will.

Hi,

I would not reserve OeBB at all if the train ride is entirely in Austria. If it's within Austria, I don't reserve, or book on-line. I take the Westbahn trains if they serve the destination. Westbahn also links with the bus, a combo of train and bus.

Unfortunately, Westbahn doesn't do Vienna to Zurich.

Or Ljubljana.

I found a discussion on Tripadvisor of the OeBB website. On person acknowledged the date problem---if you make any changes in your query it resets to the following day. So you have to be careful about that. Maybe this is what happened above?

If not those places since they are outside of Austria, then you transfer. Get a Westbahn ticket to the transfer point

the new OEBB website is a disaster.

Amen to that. They should just abandon it and get German Rail to write one for them.

Case in point, I'm currently planning a trip for some unspecified time in the future. On one of the days, I want to travel from Lindau to a resort near Oberaudorf, Germany, on the Inn just north of the Austrian border. The quickest route would be through Munich and Rosenheim, but I've been on all those rail lines many times; I want to go through the Austrian Tirol and Innsbruck.

Because my route includes multiple connections in Austria, German Rail will not sell me the ticket online. I have to use OeBB.

I've found a connection I almost like using "Ticket buchen" function. It comprises an S-Bahn to Bregenz, RailJets to Innsbruck, then Kufstein, and a regional train from Kufstein to Oberaudorf. The problem is that the S-Bahn leaves Lindau at 11:25 and get to Bregenz at 11:37, three minutes before the RJ leaves from across the platform at 11:40. Being cross-platform, that connection should be no problem if the S-Bahn is on time, but if, for some reason, the S-Bahn is late, I'll miss my connection in Bregenz and arrive in Oberaudorf too late to catch the last bus to the resort. Fortunately, there is an S-Bahn 24 minutes earlier, that gets me to Bregenz with 27 minutes to catch the RJ. But with the buchen function on the OeBB website, there is no way to specify the earlier S-Bahn.

It would not be a problem on the Bahn website. I could specify an earlier arrival in Bregenz by selecting "adjust transfer time". Or I could specify Bregenz as a stopover with at least 20 minute stopover time.

I can use the Verbindung function; it let's me specify über Bregenz with an Aufenhaltsdauer of 20 minutes, and I can see my desired connectoin. However, when I try to purchase the ticket, it changes my connection back to the later S-Bahn with 3 minutes in Bregenz.

Because of the Vor- und Nach-lauf provision of Bahn SparPreis tickets, I could take any S-Bahn after midnight that morning; only the long distance trains are locked in. However, a review of the AGB for Austrian Rail seems to indicate that all train are specific on the SparSchiene ticket.

I can book just the Bregenz to Kufstein ticket and pay for the S-Bahn I want myself (~10€ for two), but the SparSchiene price to Kufstein is the same from either Bregenz or Lindau, so it will just cost more that way.