I want to travel from Villefranche-sur-mer to Lucerne on June 5th. I was unable to book the entire trip online, so I purchased tickets from Villefranche-sur-mer to Milan on the TGV-Europe site when they came available. I arrive in Milan at 14:50 and the train I want to Lucerne (via Arth-Goldau) departs at 15:10, so I want to have a ticket in my hand due to the short time between trains. The trip from Milan to Lucerne has been available for a week or so and I've been checking daily, but I'm running into a problem. The Swiss train site, which on all of my practice runs offered a print ticket at home option, now only gives the options of picking the tickets up at a ticket counter (impossible since I won't be in Switzerland) or delivery by Post at a charge of CHF85 for US customers. TGV-Europe continues to say, "The registered delivery option has been temporarily disactivated. Therefore, this option will not be proposed." The only option is delivery by post. Any thoughts on how I can get around this?
Also, the prices have varied all over the place. On my test runs, the Swiss site offered a special fare of CHF41 to Lucerne, but now the prices I'm getting range from CHF 80-123 just for the trip to Arth-Goldau and they won't let me buy tickets all the way to Lucerne. There are lots of trains from Arth-Goldau after our arrival time, so I'm not so worried about having tickets for that leg.
Does this ever get easy?